More RAM or SSD for lightroom

G-Slev

G-Slev

Messages
450
Name
Gary
Edit My Images
Yes
I currently have the following setup:

Intel - Core i5-8600K 3.6GHz 6-Core Processor
Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 3 Motherboard
Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory
Western Digital - WD Green 1TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
Toshiba - P300 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Zotac - GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Mini Video Card

Plus two backup drives for the two drives above.

I use lightroom Classic and photoshop CC for my image editing. I do a lot of panoramas which can be anything up to 10 images in size.

From watching the task manager, it would seem my RAM is maxing out at around 70% when I am merging panoramas. That said, the more panoramas I merge, the slower lightroom becomes after a while - though shutting it down and restarting it seems to help.

I have a bit of spare cash and I am wondering if I would be better buying:

  • Another 16gb of 3000 memory
  • A sata 3 SSD (500gb)
  • An NVME SSD (256gb)
Any suggestion which would be the best use of my money?
 
Sorry this isn't completely on topic but how on EARTH are you not using an SSD for every day use?!

Wouldn't use/own a machine without one now. its the sinlge biggest performance increase of any machine for the last decade.

Aside from telling you to have an SSD as your OS & Apps drive (because you should) to figured out your bottlenecks open task manager/performance monitor and perform strenuous tasks and see if anything is bottlenecking (hanging around in the 85-90% + region in terms of usage) - if it is, thats where you can specifically target your money to relieve that.

But back to what I originally said. Fit an SSD!
 
An SSD is a surprising omission to an otherwise great spec and yes that’s what you need.

Extra ram is useless for Lightroom, Photoshop yes, LR no.

I would buy a 256 nvme ssd for windows and Lightroom and a 500gb ssd for your ‘working’ Catalogue and leave the rest of your images on your old spinning drives.

I assume you’ve yanked and cranked that cpu to 5+ghz on all cores?
 
Brazo said:
An SSD is a surprising omission to an otherwise great spec and yes that’s what you need.

Extra ram is useless for Lightroom, Photoshop yes, LR no.

I would buy a 256 nvme ssd for windows and Lightroom and a 500gb ssd for your ‘working’ Catalogue and leave the rest of your images on your old spinning drives.

I assume you’ve yanked and cranked that cpu to 5+ghz on all cores?
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No, I don't want to try overclocking. I don't want to damage my processor.
 
PhotoBoris said:
No, I don't want to try overclocking. I don't want to damage my processor.
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Well it won’t damage it. That’s what the ‘k’ variants are for. It’s so quick and easy for lots of free performance.
 
Brazo said:
Well it won’t damage it. That’s what the ‘k’ variants are for. It’s so quick and easy for lots of free performance.
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I don't really get all this increasing voltage business and it seems to me if you put too much voltage through something that isn't intended to run at that power, it can't do it much good.
 
PhotoBoris said:
I don't really get all this increasing voltage business and it seems to me if you put too much voltage through something that isn't intended to run at that power, it can't do it much good.
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Completely fine up to 1.4v. People have been doing this for years and as long as you stay within sensible guidelines without issue. You shouldnt need to go over 1.35 to get to 5+ on a decent motherboard.

My i7 runs at I think 1.38 and I really don’t lose any sleep!
 
Brazo said:
Completely fine up to 1.4v. People have been doing this for years and as long as you stay within sensible guidelines without issue. You shouldnt need to go over 1.35 to get to 5+ on a decent motherboard.

My i7 runs at I think 1.38 and I really don’t lose any sleep!
Click to expand...

I might read up a bit more on it then. Thanks.
 
Jake said:
Sorry this isn't completely on topic but how on EARTH are you not using an SSD for every day use?!

Wouldn't use/own a machine without one now. its the sinlge biggest performance increase of any machine for the last decade.

Aside from telling you to have an SSD as your OS & Apps drive (because you should) to figured out your bottlenecks open task manager/performance monitor and perform strenuous tasks and see if anything is bottlenecking (hanging around in the 85-90% + region in terms of usage) - if it is, thats where you can specifically target your money to relieve that.

But back to what I originally said. Fit an SSD!
Click to expand...
Not off topic at all. I suppose I always thought they were overpriced for the amount of storage they provide.

Plus, I upgraded to the spec above earlier this year from an Athlon x4 860 so I suppose I didn't really need it given the massive boost in performance.
 
PhotoBoris said:
Not off topic at all. I suppose I always thought they were overpriced for the amount of storage they provide.

Plus, I upgraded to the spec above earlier this year from an Athlon x4 860 so I suppose I didn't really need it given the massive boost in performance.
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Adding and booting off an SSD is a HUGE increase, a 500Gb one is only around £70 now, by far the cheapest £/upgrade you'll get.
They get expensive when you start looking at the 1Tb+ range, but for something like Lightroom, I'd stick the catalog files on the SSD along with the previews and leave the originals on the other hard disk if space is tight.

I would definitely go for SSD over RAM if I had to choose, once minimum RAM requirements are met (which they are).
 
PhotoBoris said:
I don't really get all this increasing voltage business and it seems to me if you put too much voltage through something that isn't intended to run at that power, it can't do it much good.
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There is a small FREE program called core-temp which can protect your computer against overheating:

https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/

On my machines this little program starts with Windows and the overheat protection is set to 75 C .

Makes your PC a bit safer because it can turn off if it reaches the set overheat protection.
 
PhotoBoris said:
Not off topic at all. I suppose I always thought they were overpriced for the amount of storage they provide.

Plus, I upgraded to the spec above earlier this year from an Athlon x4 860 so I suppose I didn't really need it given the massive boost in performance.
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You'll be blown away by it. Trust me :)
 
I've ordered a 500gb Sata 3 SSD. Thanks for all the tips. I will reinstall windows to the SSD and put my adobe apps and lighroom catalogue on there once it arrives. It's a pain having to do a fresh install, but it seems the most sensible thing to do in the circumstances.

Thanks for all the tips.
 
You can clone your current drive over to the SSD using Acronis or other software. It’ll operate as the old one did, just on much faster hardware :) Sometimes the SSDs come with the software to do it
 
@PhotoBoris RAM. Go for more RAM your computer can support. But also consider closing down any other application software you are not using, for example, don't use iTunes to listen to music while you do your work, don't surf the Internet, catch up on Facebook, while you do your work. Free up as much space in the RAM as you can. (That is the reason for your restarting the computer, to empty the RAM, to get more space.)

SSD is a secondary option, it will help but it is usually a secondary option. If RAM is full, then Photoshop would swap the data it is not working on, from the RAM to the SSD, and take any data it needs to work on from the SSD to the RAM.

That's why it is better to upgrade RAM first then if still struggling, opt for SSD.
 
One thought, do you have GPU processing enabled in LR? You've got a dedicated video card so that should help as well.
 
andy1868 said:
You can clone your current drive over to the SSD using Acronis or other software. It’ll operate as the old one did, just on much faster hardware :) Sometimes the SSDs come with the software to do it
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I have slightly too much stuff to clone it to a 500gb SSD - though god knows how. My images are on the 2tb disk and the only games I have installed are BF4 and project cars 2.
 
I do have GPU acceleration enabled - I have a 1050ti - and I find that it works far better with Nvidia cards than it ever did with AMD cards.
 
You'll see a big improvement with the SSD; made a vast difference to my machine (which has a measly 4GB RAM). For work I work on photoshop files up to 2GB. This was not fun on my old setup!
 
I too have an ASUS Z370 mobo but with the i5-8400 CPU and had a 256GB M.2 SSD installed for system and applications - it's blindingly quick to power up and open LR and PS (both CC versions).

When I first bought the PC it had 8GB of DDR4 RAM and I thought I would see some increase in performance by upping that to 16GB but, to be honest, any change was minimal. Adding a normal SSD for the LR catalogue made a much bigger difference :)

The catalogue SSD is also used for initial culling and editing of images to maximise speed but when I'm done they're all moved onto a 7200rpm 1TB internal HDD. It's a process that works really well for me :)
 
I have to say, I bought an OCZ/Toshiba SSD for my PC (a 500gb one) and I have moved the windows installation on there and also put photoshop, lightroom and the catalogue and previews on there. It really is like night and day - panoramas stitch and process so much more quickly and generally everything responds far more snappily.

Thanks for the tips - though I may still save up and chuck an extra 16gb of RAM at if I can save the money!
 
neil_g said:
75c is waaaay within the safe limits of most modern cpu. 90c+ will be issue areas and don't forget your bios already has thermal protection settings.
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MMM - not on some of my machines - lol
 
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