Upgrade - AMD X6 or i3

[philthejuggler]

Hi all

My 3.4Ghz P4 is occasionally struggling with lightroom (just the adjustment brushes mainly) and I'm considering an upgrade.

My local Maplin store has a few bundles that might be of interest.

For £250 and both with 4Gb of ram are a Phenom X6 bundle and an i3 bundle.

Which is likely to be better for photo-editing?

Thanks in advance!

Phil

 

[theboss]

as an intel fanboy i will allways say intel because there gear is reliable

 

[Mikesphotaes]

The X6 has a higher benchmark than the i3 if that counts?

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php


I've never had any problems with AMD but that probably means nowt around here.

 

[philthejuggler]

Thanks for the thoughts. It's difficult, you always seem to get more bang for your buck with AMD, but when I was building computers regularly years ago I found Intel machines seemed to have fewer problems with Windows.

Phil

 

[neil_g]

The X6 has a higher benchmark than the i3 if that counts?

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

I've never had any problems with AMD but that probably means nowt around here.

Amd used to make some very good processors, these days the higher end is dominated by intel especially with the i5 and i7 sandybridge which amd has nothing to compare to. Yet.

If the op had more of a budget I'd suggest intel i5 but on this budget there is nothing "wrong" with amd offering.

To the op, the other half has an i3 laptop and it's not blisteringly fast at all with lightroom 2. In my opinion you may be worth holding on to that cash for a bit longer and adding to it if you can.

 

[arad85]

Without knowing which X6 or i3 is in the bundle, it is difficult to say. Generally, faster base clock rate means better day-to-day performance, more cores mean quicker image processing.

Having said that, there is a known bug with Lightroom and adjustment brushes that cause it to eat memory (see for example here: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/memory_leaks_with_adjustment_brush). This will be very obvious if you're using a 32bit OS (as the amount of memory LR can use is very limited) or if you only have a small amount of memory.

If you really do have an Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.4GHz (which is benchmarked at 932 on CPUBenchmark.net link posted above) it will be handsomely beaten by either bundle you mention (but also factor in Win7 64bit and a modern disk - i.e. SATAII, 1Tb with large cache - if you don't have them).