PC upgrade or new

Peter10d

Peter10d

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Looking for advice please as my knowledge on pc power is very limited. I recently purchased Luminar 4 which was unusable on my pc, going so slow and freezing. Prior to the purchase I have been using an old standalone version of Lightroom which works fine. To their credit Skylum software have offered me a full refund, but I would like a pc that is capable of working such a program. My existing pc is a Toshiba LX830-137, core i5, 4GB RAM, 1TB storage with 750gb still available (apologies if I have missed anything relevent). Someone advised me that if I got a decent SSD and additional RAM it would improve the performance. I have since found out that Skylum minimum requirements and recommended are very different. They suggest i7, SSD and 16gb RAM. I am therefore wondering if I upgraded my 7 year pc with SSD and RAM, do you think it would work, or is the i7 crucial to the processing part. Also apart from the Luminar software, would it be worthwhile upgrading my 7 year old pc with SSD and RAM, or is it so dated, it would just be a waste of money?
 
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Just looking at the specs for Luminar 4

  • Intel® Core™ i7 7th generation or better, AMD Ryzen™ 7 2nd generation or better
  • Discrete GPU with 4GB+ of RAM
  • 16+ GB of RAM
  • SSD as primary drive
  • Calibrated monitor with at least 1920×1200 resolution
It certainly is quite processor intensive,the first question I suppose is if you need it will your existing PC at 7 years old upgrade to those specs and if it will it won't be cheap.
What I find interesting is looking at this article https://shotkit.com/luminar-review/ the author says it is also a plug in for LR/PS which run on lower specs in addition to which he says it runs OK on a i5 MacBook Pro so make of that what you will.
If you are determined to run the software then see if your existing PC is upgradeable to those specs, what that will cost compared to a new m\c.
Personally if you are happy with your existing set up unless I really needed the benefits of an upgraded PC ( whichever way you do it) for other reasons I don't think I would bother.
 
I doubt a ram increase and ssd will do all that much difference because it is highly likely that the CPU and graphics power are the issue also.

It is likely a i5-3230M wich scores around 4000 on cpubenchmark.

The recommended CPU power is likely an i7-7700 or similar which scores 10700 on the same scores test.

As you can see you probably don't even have half of the recommended CPU power in my opinion.
 
A decent editing PC now will have a strong Video card which does a lot of work in addition to CPU and RAM, It's definitely better to invest in something which will fly with such stuff for years to come.
It's often not even all that pricey for tower only.
 
Just a quick heads up
have a look at this post

https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/free-luminar-3.706060/#post-8603913

I have just downloaded it and tried it stand alone and as a plug in for LR.
This is on an i5, 16gb DDR4 ram and installed it on an SSD running Win 10 and it works OK as a LR Plug in ( LR sees it as an external editor)
Might be worth a go for free on your M/c
 
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