Computer upgrade advice?

M

Mark M

Suspended / Banned
Messages
2
Edit My Images
Yes
Ive just bought Lightroom CS and got it up and running on my PC looking to learn the ropes but it is painstakingly slow when using it so I think its time I upgraded the PC. Its been years since I built a PC (which is probably why lightroom grinds to a halt) so Im well out of the upgrade loop! I'll need everything except an OS and i'll keep my existing monitors, mouse, keyboard etc. Ideally I'll like to keep it to about £500 but have no idea what processor I should be looking at to get the most out of LR?

Edit to add - I dont play games etc and have a basic dual head graphics card that I can keep as I dont believe LR utilises the graphics card too much? Happy to upgrade in the future if need be of course.
 
Biggest thing would be a decent SSD drive. I used to get a 128GB for the OS and some programs but then that turned to 256GB and now I'll only get 512GB as it does start to fill up. If possible an i5 as I've found i3's seem to struggle sometimes and a good motherboard! It's something I never (and probably wrongly) consider to be all that important other than features - but completely overlook component quality. I think a lot of people here use Scan for components.

There will be others here far better to advice though.
 
Last edited:
Hi Mark, If you fancy building it yourself you could do worse than have a look at Tech Report website. It's US based and seems to be geared to gamers, but it's full of useful and up to date info on developments. I built their budget system about four years ago and it's still whizzing along, though recent LR developments are stratching it a little now. I bought the bits from UK suppliers like Amazon and Overclockers UK and the whole thing (minus monitor. keyboard etc whic, like you, I kept) came to £500. They update their proposed builds every couple of months and the "budget" seems to fulfill our needs perfectly. Interesting forums as well if you ignore the "must have latest" gamers!
Give it a try

https://techreport.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=33&sid=005e711d2707e2b6ffc8040225212a4a
 
I have found the more you throw at light room the more it takes.

Agree the best thing is an SSD to run lightroom from and another drive for the images to work off.
After that memory. I gave mine 128GB Ram and a decent graphics card for LR to use the GPU too.

I recently read an article that suggests that photographers are moving away from Macs because although the architecture is better they can't compete with bespoke systems where the money goes on application specific uses

(all my other computer work is done on a lesser machine)
 
I've recently ordered a new PC. I can't recommend it at the moment because it hasn't been delivered yet and I don't know if I've spent my money wisely or not! I found this website useful: https://www.pugetsystems.com/recomm...-Adobe-Lightroom-141/Hardware-Recommendations . The machines that they sell are well out of my price range, but they do explain what they think you need and why. The information on how Lightroom uses the graphics cards and how many cores will be used is useful.
 
128GB of Ram! What do you do that manages to use it all because I struggle to use up 16GB lol
 
base system was 64 but they were offering double ram month at the time
 
neil_g said:
64 is ludicrous let alone 128. It's wasted money for photo editing.

In reality LR and PS are happy with a quad core, 16gb and ssd.
Click to expand...
An SSD is always good, but last I looked LR was unable to make use of multicore CPUs (unlike PS) so you need a high clock speed for choice. Running pretty well here on 16GB and an i5 3570K, pretty mid range. And I only have 16GB because I do some pretty large stitched panos at times. Anything over 24 GB is probably silly.
 
neil_g said:
64 is ludicrous let alone 128. It's wasted money for photo editing.

In reality LR and PS are happy with a quad core, 16gb and ssd.
Click to expand...

And 24 mpx is sufficient but people buy 100mpx digital backs
 
dave.hallett said:
An SSD is always good, but last I looked LR was unable to make use of multicore CPUs (unlike PS) so you need a high clock speed for choice. Running pretty well here on 16GB and an i5 3570K, pretty mid range. And I only have 16GB because I do some pretty large stitched panos at times. Anything over 24 GB is probably silly.
Click to expand...

LR will max all cores given a chance (I.e. batch processing).

jamesev said:
And 24 mpx is sufficient but people buy 100mpx digital backs
Click to expand...

Not quite the same as most of the system sat there twiddling it's thumbs.
 
neil_g said:
LR will max all cores given a chance (I.e. batch processing).
Click to expand...
Yes, it does rather depend on how you use it. And it's well worth having a quad for other reasons. I just wanted to make the OP aware that LR is slightly disappointing in this regard, compared with PS, and it's something to bear in mind when speccing a system if LR is your main workhorse.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top