System Builder Marathon, Q2 2013: System Value Compared

Results: Adobe CS6

When Adobe After Effects is presented with a large number of physical and logical cores, it needs lots of system memory to allocate to each one. Because my Core i7 gives the application eight threads, I used this benchmark as an excuse to drop two 8 GB modules into my little $2500 machine. The experiment appears to pay off, and the priciest machine achieves the best performance.

Photoshop appears to prefer my system’s dual-GPU graphics card in its OpenCL test.

Premiere’s preference for expensive processors reflects the small but noticeable boost we’ve seen in a few other applications able to benefit from Hyper-Threading. The $2500 machine’s CPU is also clocked the highest, accounting for part of its lead.

A productivity application that’s associated with Adobe’s creativity suite, our PowerPoint-to-PDF conversion workload using Acrobat X is decidedly single-threaded. Nevertheless, Don's overclocked Core i5 secures a win even in light of its less aggressive frequency.