CPU & GPU Optimisation whats best?

Sam, a few of us have reasonably high end systems, some built for non linear editing of video with apps like Premiere Pro and After Effects.  They are way more demanding on system resources, and you can actually quantify the effect of your system's GPU using the old PPBM5 set of benchmarks.  You'll need to click to expand this chart, which shows the top twenty odd systems, but the interesting bit are the three columns I have highlighted (definitely not visible without expanding the screen shot or visiting the page from the above link).  MPE stands for Mercury Playback Engine, and I believe uses the GPU differently from Photoshop.  The different times (in seconds) with MPE turned on and off is dramatic to say the least with gains from around ten, to Harm's Monster which shows a gain of 39/1 !!!

I never miss a chance to boast that my box is still in 17th place on that table, but they stopped updating the table three years ago.

One of the links above is for Pugot Systems, who have dozens of excellent articles revealing real world benefits of one GPU over another for demanding software.  I think you will need to go back a way to find the best Photoshop articles, but they are still relevant.  So for the most part, we try to stay as current as we need to to keep everything working nicely.  For me that just means everything feeling snappy with no lags states.  My entry in the PPBM5 table is dated January 2012 and I am still using that same system, albeit with a GTX970 GPU now, and a bunch of SSDs, but I will be updating this year.   Your GPU dates your laptop at around three years old now, but my laptop uses the previous series NVIDEA card, and is very comfortable using all the CC products.  It seems to me that that's good enough.

BTW  I honestly think that all of the regular posters on this forum would feature well up the Aspergers scale, but it would be way too boring to be thought of as normal.

Indeed, It depends what your doing with it, too lovely fella, this is just an initial test with a bunch of merely JPG mirrors of RAWS my Cam took, to test if it was using all my horsepower I threw at it for stitching into a 360 Panorama, thats before full blown 32bit native true HDR stitching and taking that into a 3D Space for some fancy fiddling. And if you can see at this point its soo not using all the CPU power properly thats for sure, need to see if the Cuda tool will let me see what the NVIDIA GPU is up too, or any recommends on a utility for this a real need please.

P.S. Photoshop is not crashing, thats NOT an issue, on intensive processing it is getting bogged down (still beavering away), due to not using all the computer power however.