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I mentioned 128Gb memory kits for Windows systems costing $2000. 128Gb for the Mac Pro is $500 more at $2,500
More Options for 128 GB Mac Pro RAM Upgrades Now Available - Mac Rumors
When I quote prices it is always in US dollars unless I use a prefix like NZ$. My 64Gb of G-Skill Trident Z 3600 is costing me NZ$1300 which is about US$1000.
US Prices
NZ — it looks like I actually underestimated the NZ mark-up by a couple of hundred dollars. And no I won't be using the RGB glow in the dark modules. These kits are specifically recommended for X299 and X399 systems
Kat, our old buddy Professor Norman Sanders has just replaced his eight year old Mac with a nice new iMac, Norman has an orange forum badge, as you know, but was still using CS6 because because his hardware would not support later versions of OSX. He was also staying with the old Mac because some of the software he uses would not run in newer OSX versions.
He is keeping the old Mac, and describes its performance as 'chugging along' and 'quaint'. If and when my new build ever turns up (I paid a hefty deposit at the end of October! 
— I'll pass my 3930K system with 32Gb RAM to my wife to use. On the occasions I have to do a bit of tidying up on her two core AMD system (Q9550) which has 8Gb RAM, and unbelievably slow drives, and a Windows Experience Index of just 4.6, I can't understand how she could put up with such a slow system. It would drive me demented.
If anyone reading this is still using an older Windows system and has a lower WEI than 4.6, I'd love to hear about it.
I can only speak for Windows Brian. The only experience I have with Macs was at MAX last year.
I know some of the Blur Gallery filters are multi threaded. I had to increas the image size to 20,000 pixels wide to get my system to take enough time to make a meaningful sample of the core/thread usage.
What surprised me was that there was not more disk usage as Photoshop helped itself to 30Gb of space on the Scratch drive, and I would have expected a fair bit of read and write to that temp file.
Emboss used a single core.
Smart Sharpen used all 12 cores, and only took a moment to do its thing. From memory, some of the benefits we are getting from the GPU is in creating the preview. I also seem to remember something about high system resource users like the Healing brush, and Liquify, use the GPU to show changes in real time.
Here you go. 5000 pixel Spot Healing Brush using all 12 threads.
Going back to the Blur Gallery filters, but looking at GPU usage. This is Iris blur on that same 20,000 pixel wide 16 bit image.
The thing is though, I have look at functions than I remembered as making good use system resources. That Spot Healing brush for instance with a maxed out 5000 pixel brush. My 3930K system is six years old, and running that brush right across the above image, tied up Photoshop for about 30 seconds, but I still had full use of the rest of my system.
I linked to the Threadripper thread on the PremPro hardware forum a few days ago. That has a bunch of people crying into their beer (where do these weird simalies come from? 
) because their uber expensive new computer builds, are under performing with Photoshop and After Effects. I now can't wait for my 10 core i9-7900X build to be delivered, because it seems that a good bit of Photoshop is not as lightly threaded as I thought.
One more test, as I know that Liquify is supposed to make special use of resources. The interesting thing here is that I was able to make the brush as big as I liked, but settled for about 10,000 pixels. The preview window responds completely in real time with zero lag, and the GPU became maxed out. The CPU was only showing one core two threads with any degree of usage, and that did not change when I committed the Liquify. Goodness knows where some people, who really should know better, get off whining that the Photoshop Development Team are pants because their 36 thread $2000 CPU is not being maxed out with every operation. It's a real pity that Chris Cox is not still with Adobe, because so many of his contributions to these forums were pure gold.
Brian, I mostly take a 'black box' view of the inner workings of Adobe apps. [1] They work extremely well for the most part, but this thread on the Premiere Pro Hardware forum features a number of people who are dissatisfied with their new Threadripper and also discusses the higher end i9X CPUs from Intel. These people even compare their expensive new builds to their old six core systems, and say they are not as fast. This is all more poignant when you consider that the new system will almost certainly have the additional advantage of uber-fast NVMe M.2 drives, and faster bus and memory speeds.
Plus we have the app specific benchmarks from Puget Systems, which compare Threadripper and 19-7940X disfavorably with the 6 core 8700K, and even the much older 7700K. So when considering a new build, it would be crazy to ignore this evidence. Where people are going wrong IMHO is in how they interpret these results by concluding that the 1950X Threadripper has 16 cores, whereas the 8700K has only 6, so therefore Photoshop is lightly threaded.
It's obviously not that simple. I spent way more time and effort into researching the build I am currently waiting on, and I am still nopt sure I made the right choice, but I decided that the Intel i9-7900X was the best compromise because it has a decent single core Turbo speed, but with 10 cores, up to three NVMe drives, 3600Mhz memory, would run all the other stuff in the background. How many of us run multiple Adobe apps at the same time for instance? I use three screens, and often have half a dozen different windows running separate processes, and I am assuming that is when I'll see the benefit of 10 cores, 20 threads, and 44 PCIe lanes.
[1] To qualify 'mostly' I do have a pet theory about Photoshop and Smart Objects, as I have at least twice run into trouble on my still reasonably spec'd 6 core 3930K with 32Gb RAM system with large projects that used a lot of nested Smart Objects. When I say 'trouble' I mean I abandoned the projects because of unbearable lag. Moving one of the Smart Objects would cause my entire system to stall for about three seconds, and I still had a lot more work to do. One of the first things I will be doing when I get my new build, is revisiting those projects, but thoughts are that the issue is centered around disk usage as the projects generated very large temp files on the Scratch drive.
When Puget Systems first published these articles, I spent ages totaling the long list of results for all the setups that interested me, and I actually found that the cheaper 1920X Threadripper had the lowest total. That was probably not the best approach, as I personally rarely use a good many of filters etc. that they tested with.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php
Unfortunately though Brian, I know absolutely nothing about Mac hardware, and I suspect that I harbour a few misconceptions about what us Windows users perceive to be their shortcomings. Having said that, I never tire of pointing out that the highest placed Mac in Bill and Harm's PPBM5 results table, was way down in 661st place out of 1351 entries, and that my six year old system still stands in 17th place. It held 4th place for a good while as well.
[EDIT] I forgot the link
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