PC Upgrade for lightroom

mikeyw

mikeyw

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Edit My Images
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Guys,

I'm struggling to get reasonable performance from lightroom (2015.1 version) and seem to be CPU bound. The disk is a fairly modern 1TB but a bit on the full side.

Does this spec of CPU seem on the low side ? - when lightroom is running its normally in the 90's. Trying to keep spend to a minimum atm so might try and pick up a second hand base unit if needed.

Thanks in advance,
Mike.

cpu.JPG
 
Mike,

I had to upgrade to i5 machine to see an improvement on LR5.7, with my older dell which had the same CPU as yours using the brushes was way too slow.

I did have a ssd for the os and WD black 1tb hd, that improved a bit but not as much as the machine I have now with the above and i5 cpu.

Kev
 
Cheers Kev - have you found the image load speed better as well ?.....taking ages to load the detail as i sequence between images even in the library module.

Doing heavy brush work just kills it....

What sort of price are we talking for a basic i5 unit ?

Cheers,
Mike.
 
Mike,

Yes it fast loading the pictures and for editing.

I did not want to spend much so picked up a used hp 8200 i5 tower from eBay for about £100. It came with a 250gb hd and 4gb ram with Win 7.

I upped the ram to 8gb and swapped the hd for my old ssd and wd black 1tb hd.

Kev
 
My pc was lower spec than yours and only had 4gb of ram, which could not be increased any higher. I ended up getting a new pc.

There is a Lightroom forum which has some useful tips on settings that may help your system.
 
Cheers Kev - do these just have 2 drive bays ?

Think if i built a new PC i'd have 1 x SDD and 2 x 1TB drives for the data & backup
 
mikeyw said:
Think if i built a new PC i'd have 1 x SDD and 2 x 1TB drives for the data & backup
Click to expand...
There's a strategy involved here! I'd go with one ssd - say of 500GB - in the machine plus a say 1TB internal hdd for data 'on tap'. BUT - you strictly need external backup for everything in case a power supply problem for instance fries all your internal drives. It has happened!

So 2 copies of everything, in the first instance one in and one out, and for long-term storage for stuff moved off the internal drives, double up on the external ones.
 
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Your definitely on the right track. Plenty of ram (its cheap today or relatively so) 100% run an SSD for your "C" drive and if your machine is just for photo editing you can easily use a 240g SSD with just the OS and PS and Lightroom etc on. Then a second drive for your photos and LR catalog. Then an external drive, for your backup. Now you can set up LR to import to your main catalog, and at the same time import to an external drive, so you will always have a copy of your work on your external drive (every now and again just back up a copy of your catalog too).
I'd say that the minimum requirement.
 
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