i5 2500k - worth an upgrade?

futureal33

futureal33

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Afternoon all!

I generally try to upgrade my PC every few years, and its now into my 4th year of running my current PC with absolutely no hiccups at all (touch wood!!!)

My system spec is

i5 2500k overclocked to around 4.2Ghz (from 3.3)
Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600mhz x 16GB
Boot drive: 256GB SSD (also has Lightroom and PS on it)

I don't do any gaming. The system is purely my editing workstation and runs Lightroom / Photoshop only.

Would I see any benefit in upgrading? I notice there is a new i7 6700k CPU which reviews very well and also new DDR4 3000Mhz memory... would I see any benefit?

Running Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CS6

Thanks :)
 
can your motherboard accept it? 2nd gen intel boards generally arent compatible (well mine isnt). or are you talking complete CPU, RAM and board change?

to be honest my i7-2600k (clocked to 4.4) and 16gb ddr3 (even at 1600) aren't really showing their age in CC PS and LR so I'm in no hurry to shift it.
 
neil_g said:
can your motherboard accept it? 2nd gen intel boards generally arent compatible (well mine isnt). or are you talking complete CPU, RAM and board change?

to be honest my i7-2600k and ddr3 aren't really showing their age in CC PS and LR so I'm in no hurry to shift it.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply :)

I am talking complete change to CPU. Mobo, RAM but keeping GPU, HDDs etc.

Im not really sure how CPU intensive running Lightroom is? I know when doing an export of say 700 files, then my CPU goes to 100% but in general running it seems to be idle and RAM usage is also very low (typically 6GB / 16GB used)
 
do you have any issues while editing now? if no, why bother :)

I have my old i7-3770K (clocked only to 4.2GHz with Noctua NH-D14 cooler) and with 16GB ddr3. 2xSSD's (one for system, another scratchdisk for adobe stuff)

think huge imporvements i would see in adobe after effects / premiere pro (if i was to upgrade), not so much for simple editing with photoshop (unless you do a lot of rendering etc.)
 
LR does love a bit of CPU and fast disk especially when batch processing, the older versions never used to use a lot of RAM (CC seems to hog a fair bit more though I've found).

faster CPU and/or GPU would help with video work, my 7850 practically takes off exporting GoPro footage from Premiere Elements..
 
Having moved from a 2500k to a 4770k a year or so back, there is barely any difference in LR.

I do love tinkering with my PC though, probably the main reason I did it!
 
video editing eats all recources, especially if you using after effects with 3D layers.... for photoshop work your pc still very good (unless you gonna start using 50MB+ raw files, but even then it's still could perfom ok-ish)

surely somebody did similar upgrade to what you thinking of doing, so they could give their reviews :)
 
Slightly off topic... but got me thinking!

At the moment my OS, Lightroom, Photoshop and a couple of other programs run off the 256GB SSD.
My photos that I am working on live on a 3TB WD Green drive.

How much faster would Lightroom be if I was editing pictures saved on an SSD as opposed to a normal HDD?
 
arad85 did a test a while back and concluded that LR loved the Cat and at least the working set of images on SSD.

theres an old thread somewhere with benchmarks if i remember rightly.

side note - anyone know where andy went?
 
i7 2700k here, I see no point in spending £250 on top of selling current stuff for latest tech, gain is too little and not noticeable.

I am, however, watching SSD prices. Cheapest now is 480GB for £90. It is worth putting photo editing on an SSD. I've found there is a massive difference in responsiveness when I trailed a RAM caching program to cache read/writes to my 1TB WD Green photos drive.
 
Did an interesting test last night

Basically HDD vs SSD (as per Arad87's test)

Specifics:
Images on Extreme PRO SD card.
New Catalog created for each import. Catalog saved on respective drives (HDD and SSD)
Imported via USB 3.0 straight to SSD and then HDD (and timed)
1:1 previews built
Images exported as 100% jpegs to respective drives (HDD and SSD)

The performance and times were nigh on identical..

Import times (145 RAW files from 5D mark III)
SSD: 1min 15 seconds
HDD: 1min 19 seconds

1:1 Previews Building
SSD: 5min 35 seconds
HDD: 5min 35 seconds

Export times (145 images exported as 100% qlty jpegs no other adjustments)
SSD: 3min 17 seconds
HDD: 3min 17 seconds

Sounds crazy but these times are 100% accurate, timed on my stopwatch app on my phone.

I cant understand how the times are the same... but they really are!
 
Clearly disk access is not a big part of the lightroom process then! Good to know though, thanks for doing that!
 
But when you scroll through the images or switching to Develop mode, does it feel faster when the RAW files are on SSD?
 
wuyanxu said:
But when you scroll through the images or switching to Develop mode, does it feel faster when the RAW files are on SSD?
Click to expand...

Hard to compare with actual stopwatch timings, but yes it did feel snappier flicking from one image to another, doing cropping (it didnt lag at all), and scrolling through quickly in grid view was smooth, whereas when the images were on the HDD there was a slight "jittery-ness" when scrolling - nothing quantifiable but it did seem a little smoother.

Still surprised that the import times and export were identical
 
wuyanxu said:
i7 2700k here, I see no point in spending £250 on top of selling current stuff for latest tech, gain is too little and not noticeable.

I am, however, watching SSD prices. Cheapest now is 480GB for £90. It is worth putting photo editing on an SSD. I've found there is a massive difference in responsiveness when I trailed a RAM caching program to cache read/writes to my 1TB WD Green photos drive.
Click to expand...

Did you notice general Lightroom browsing was a lot quicker with your photos on SSD?
 
I recently upgraded my PC from an i5 4670k clocked at 4.3ghz to an i7 4790k clocked at 4.6 ghz. I also swapped the data hdd for an ssd. Ram (16gb) stayed the same.

Absolutely no increase in LR (CC) performance!
 
futureal33 said:
Did you notice general Lightroom browsing was a lot quicker with your photos on SSD?
Click to expand...

I never tried photos on SSD. I tried RAM disk cache, it helped quite a bit because of my ancient 1TB Green drive. The photos come up faster and renders faster than only from HDD.
 
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