A little disappointed in quad

First let me say that I am a photographer and not a computer whiz. I peruse these forums trying to learn as much as I can. I recently switched from an "old" dual 2.0 powermac to a quad. Originally sucked in by Aperture and wanted a machine to run it faster. I have since decided that Aperture in it's present form is unusable to me, but certainly expected much increased performance with my Adobe Bridge / CS2 workflow.
Previous G5 PM: dual 2.0, 3.5 g ram, ATI Radeon 9600 pro
Present quad: 6.5 g ram, geoforce 6600 (stock)
All external hard drives, etc. are the exact same as before. Photoshop configuration (scratch disk, ram usage, etc.) set exactly the same as before. Overall, the quad is definately much "snappier" and much improved for multi-tasking with different applications open, etc. but some commands and actions in PS are actually SLOWER?? Basic things like "save for web" and "file close" (command + w) give a brief spinning beachball now where before they were instantaneous. Actions I use constantly actually take longer now. Filters (sharpening, blur, skin soften, etc.) do run a little faster but the most basic commands take longer????
I used the firewire apple transfer utility to move all software, etc. to the new quad. I use external drives to store all image files, etc. just the same as before.
Am I expecting too much difference? Photoshop not able to take advantage of extra processing or ram?? Comments?
G5 Dual 2.0 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Photoshop configuration (scratch disk, ram usage, etc.) set exactly the same as before
You shouldn't be needing a scratch disk anymore, Tiger is supposed to override Photoshop CS2's RAM limit and give it all it needs. (only CS2 supposedly)
4GB is supposed to give 40% more performance than 2GB in a Quad.
So what I'm guessing is your using up your RAM for other things, widgets, other programs and now your swapping to your scratch disk, which if you need one, really needs to be the fastest thing possible because your replacing a drive I/O speed for RAM.
A RAID O pair of the fastest drives and the fastest interface you got. This would need to be a pair of 10,000 RPM external SATA drives with a large cache, preferably 16MB, like a pair of 150 GB Western Digital RaptorX's in some sort of external enclosure like a MiniG with a Sonnet PCI SATA card, which for the Quad isn't quite out yet.
However a pair of empty Firewire 400 external drives each with a direct connection to the Quad and RAID O'ed, might do the job cheaper for less performance.
The important thing is you need a separate channel to each drive, I don't know how many Firewire 800 ports there are on the Quad, but you would need two to use this interface at maximum speed.
Of course the problem comes up that your hogging all your ports, you just can't disconnect a RAID O set as a scratch disk at will either and expect PS to be nice to you.
But it would be just better to get more RAM and get done with it.
Overall, the quad is definitely much "snappier" and much improved for multi-tasking with different applications open, etc. but some commands and actions in PS are actually SLOWER?? Basic things like "save for web" and "file close" (command + w) give a brief spinning beach-ball now where before they were instantaneous. Actions I use constantly actually take longer now. Filters (sharpening, blur, skin soften, etc.) do run a little faster but the most basic commands take longer????
This is your scratch, boot or file drive doing this to you.
Mac OS X performs much better with a very fast, slim boot drive as it caches all the time. Western Digital is coming out with a 10,000 RPM, 16MB cache, 150GB internal SATA which will make a excellent boot/itunes/bare bones "home" drive for performance. With your files in new folders on another internal drive, like the stock or something faster.
I had to RAID O my two Raptors (74GB each) to get a little more space as I keep them less than 50% filled for maximum performance in Mac OS X. However it can be a bit risky and I clone once a week to a external drive with daily file backups.
Needless to say I don't see many beach-balls.
Now another thing is you got the stock video card, supposedly some processing is dumped to that, so that might be affecting performance.
Also you have to expect that PS CS2 isn't quite fully optimized for a Quad yet, it's are pretty recent hardware addition, and there is a lot of software being recoded at Adobe from Code-warrior (now obsolete) to X-Code for Universal Binaries.
Adobe might be standardizing their code based on a dual core, because most Mac's and PC's will be having that and it's easier to write once than to write a special version for Quads. Who knows? We will find out later I guess.
What's important is you got a monster computer at a great price, the software will have to catch up that's all. Just get more RAM so you have PS CS2 use it's 4GB needed and then make sure you get more to cover anything else you like to run at the same time. Run everything in RAM as much as possible without swapping to your boot drive or scratch disk.
I have some more performance and cloning info at my site, take a peak
http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish

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