levels realized in Creative Suite can mean the difference between making or losing money on jobs. Even if you’re just a home video enthusiast who’s taken to Premiere and After Effects, would you rather spend minutes or hours on a task?

• Core i7 Quad-core...
• • Buy.com
  • $294.95
• • Office Depot
  • $347.95
• • TigerDirect
  • $299.99
• • Newegg.com
  • $294.99
• • HiTechVendors.com
  • $368.45

Potentially, this is no overstatement. With Adobe starting to built GPU acceleration into various facets of Creative Suite and better leveraging CPU multi-threading, a system running CS5 today could realize performance an order of magnitude or more better than, say, a five-year-old system running Creative Suite 2 (CS2). We’re not going to state the ridiculously obvious and benchmark just how much faster a new CS5 rig would be compared to CS2. Instead, we want to approach Adobe’s new CS5 from a hardware perspective and examine if and when it makes sense to upgrade from CS4.

After all, the move from the last-generation suite to CS5 is one of the most significant in Adobe's history. Beyond the feature expansion in each app, the company finally embraced 64-bit support, dramatically improving performance in workloads able to take advantage of extra memory. Additionally, there's a good bit of GPU acceleration in play--something we've not seen enough of from other media- and productivity-oriented titles.

So, here’s our scenario. Assume you have CS4 and are considering CS5 as a way to become more productive through getting the same tasks done more quickly. We’re going to examine three possible vectors that could be responsible for this performance increase:

to know more click here