Inspiring

Question

Lets talk about how laptops just dont cut it with todays Photoshop requirements

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
January 31, 2024
12 replies
6160 views

I bought Lenovo Legion 7i laptop with i9 and 32GB of fast ram, top of the line gaming, fastest processor, fast ram. But when I do my standard phoshop tests like "time to open" or "speed_test.atn" it is way slow, twice as slow as my 2 year old desktop with older components.

Why is that? I think its becasue of heat, that they cant put components that can use the high transfer rate and processing power of photoshop without creating too much heat.

And there is no way to tell how a laptop is put together, or how exactly the companents perform with photoshiop, without buying it. The numbers/specs mean nothng.

Anybody have a laptop that opens photoshop in 5 seconds?

thank you . . .

Windows

Bojan Živković11378569

Community Expert

i9 processors for laptops and desktops are not the same. The same applies to GPUs; as you might expect, the primary reason is cooling.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Yes. You just need to look at a laptop to see there are severe physical limitations. No one can suspend the laws of physics, despite marketing that tries to convince you otherwise. Don't buy that.

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RGB_Maestro

Participating Frequently

This is an interesting discussion! I’ve noticed that even high-end gaming laptops sometimes struggle with Photoshop due to thermal limitations, especially during prolonged use. It’s similar to how some games, like Stardew Valley, run smoothly on almost any device, but others demand serious hardware. I had to tweak my Legion 5’s settings to improve performance—maybe undervolting or adjusting power settings could help?

RGB_Maestro

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westdr1dw

Legend

Twenty years ago I was running PS on a Sony Vaio while on the road. There were some latency issues. I would not even consider editing with PS on a laptop. Even with a high end desktop there are latency issues when post processing. A nice feature in LrC is the tethering capability on a laptop.

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ExUSA

Legend

Back in the day I ran Photoshop 4 on a PowerBook 5300cs (PowerPC 603) with 24MB of RAM and an add-on 16-bit video card. Ah, good times.

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DaveJCummings

Community Expert

I know my work Dell that has 32GB of RAM sometimes struggles and sounds like a plane taking off w/ Photoshop and Illustrator, but I can use a MacBook Air from over 3 years ago and 8GB of RAM and it handles it just fine

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

The last Windows laptop I owned came with Windows 8! I don't like using Photoshop on a small screen, and did not need a laptop but last year I was travelling, and I'd been asked to run some workshops and I ended up with a MacBook Pro M2 Pro with 1TB drive and 16GB unified ram. And it runs Photoshop amazingly well. There are some wait states if I ask it to do heavy lifting, but for normal use with plenty of layers and a reasonable size project, it is snappier than my i9 13900K Windows 11 with 64GB, RTX4080 and very fast drives. Plus it is lighter than equivalent Windows laptops, and has double the battery life. I am still not a fan of the Apple OS though.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

I am out of touch now, but last I heard, Scott Kelby and The Photoshop Guys (Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowski) were all using MBPs exclusively. As in, that was the only computer they owned.

The MSI Creator series laptops are supposedly built specifically for content creation apps like Photoshop, but they also mention Premiere Pro and After Effects, which are both hard on system resources. THIS ONE is a whopping $9136 and it does not look especially well spec'd. I have to be missing something as similarly spec'd MSI Creator laptops — with 19 CPU — appear to be around half that price.

My current laptop is so old it runs Windows 8 (I tried to install Windows 10, and it was having none of it). I'm thinking of running some more workshops for the camera club peeps, so I'll need some hardware for that. The problem, as others have said or alluded to, is that running Photoshop on a laptop is a miserable experience after using three big screens on a turbo-nutter-barsteward workstation.

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RAB123Author

Inspiring

Yes, MSI supposedly has some very good specs for very good prices, but they don't have Photoshop screens which are matte, IPS and SRGB. Almost all Lenovo computers use this screen. The ThinkPad series has two internal M.2 slots, you can use two 4TB for 8TB internal RAID0 if you want and have 7000 MB/s, I don't know how many other laptops you can do that.

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westdr1dw

Legend

If you don't mind sharing your user experience over time for other users. May be title it as Laptop Experience. This would be an awesome thread for those considering to purchase a laptop for image editing.

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Barry Rudick

Inspiring

One factor I did not see mentioned. That is how large the internal SSD hardrive is. Photoshop depends on a huge volume of drive space as scratch. Especially for large images. Also, the number of undo states chosen in the prefs can have a major effect on performance. If you want to test real PS performance run a multi-step action with the undos at 2, 20 and 40. I think you will see quite a difference in times.

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westdr1dw

Legend

Yes, drive space is a factor. However, the cost for drive space is very nominal. You can buy a 2 Tb NVMe SSD for ~$100. If you exceed this space may want to take a look at investing in addiitonal external storage for archiving your files. Again very nominal. FWIW: The first Hard Drive was 3.75 Mb, size of 2 large refridgerators, and weighed over 2,000 lbs. When they went main stream they were 40 Mb and cost $350.

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Lumigraphics

Legend

$123 plus a case at Newegg

https://www.newegg.com/crucial-2tb-p3-plus/p/N82E16820156301

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RAB123Author

Inspiring

I get it. On battery they can only run on half power because heat. They forget to tell you the published specs are just when its plugged in. Even though the power setting is set to "optimize performance" when on battery, you get less. Why sell a portable battery powered computer if you can only use it on AC? Its to the point where you have to spend $6k just to get a decent machine. No thanks. If I'm going to have to use AC, I'll just use a portable desktop. What a racket.

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Lumigraphics

Legend

Which is why Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel, and now to Apple Silicon. They are killing it with the current portable models because of performance vs efficiency that Intel and AMD thus far can't match.

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RAB123Author

Inspiring

do me a favor, run the Puget test on your Mac on AC power and then on Battery, curious to see the results.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Jesus Rameriz has been using MSI Creator series laptops on The Photoshop Training Channel. To be clear, they are a sponsor, but MSI claim they work with all Adobe CC apps. I have an interest in buying a laptop, so have been looking at them in depth, and at least one review on Amazon says they are slow, which surprised me. My goto approach to laptops that will work well with the CC apps is to get a high end gaming system, because the specs are ideal for Phoptoshop etc.

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Lumigraphics

Legend

High-end Windows gaming laptops have great performance but typically are big, run hot, loud, and have poor displays for photo editing. Battery life is also not great. Just depends on what tradeoffs you want to deal with.

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RAB123Author

Inspiring

all of those things? Lenovo is the only company to offer 1 matte, 2 sRGB, and 3 IPS screens which is exactly what photographers preferred. And for $2200 its going to perform well.

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RAB123Author

Inspiring

after testing and futzing, updating the Lenovo is almost as fast as the 2 year old desktop. Both open in 4 seconds. The desktop had a Puget score of 8000 and the Lenovo 7500. I'll keep it. Really appreciate the comments.

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westdr1dw

Legend

Good you see you are satisified with the results. May want to perform some real world editing first. Test results give comparsion. Which may not equate to real world use. Also factor in the desktop age being at least double in technology when it is new. IOW when the components were released for sale. Most people who build their computers do not use components just released. When they state their computer is only 4 yo. When you consider the technology the computer is actually much older than they think.

FYI on the Lenovo computers from China. The federal government in the USA banned all Lenovo computers ~ 8 years ago. After they discovered spyware built into the hardware.

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westdr1dw

Legend

Which is why I run an older version of PS on my laptop. The more AI built in the higher power consumption. If I need the make additional tweaks I finish off on the desktop.

Although 32Gb is the norm today. May be 64Gb is needed in near future.

Would think a laptop cooler would assist if heat is a problem.

AFAIK Apple uses the RISC processor. I believe a Win PC is on par for a far less price tag.

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Lumigraphics

Legend

Apple uses ARM processors. "AI built-in" has no effect on power consumption. Much AI now is done on remote servers.

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westdr1dw

Legend

ARM (Advanced RISC Machine)., Not sure I can agree with the AI. As a PS user for the past 20+ years I have noticed an increase in resources. Even though there is a lot of data being pushed online, my GPU is processing a lot of data. May be a mis-perception but over the years while CPU processing requirement has decreased, RAM, and GPU has doubled. Which is good for desktop processing, not so good for laptop.

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Lumigraphics

Legend

This is one huge advantage with using Apple products, they have a different architecure and run much cooler and more efficiently.

Why are you so worried about how fast an application launches anyway? A couple of seconds isn't a big deal compared to everything else you do.

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