I recently did two upgrades (starting with 4GB dual core win7/64 system)

1. SSD for catalog, previews, and cache - didn't help much: far less than I expected.

2. New motherboard with 8GB ram & quad core (AMD Phenom II 965) - helped a lot: far more than I expected.

Definitely go with 64-bit OS (of course)...

PS - Intel is really hot right now (and significantly more expensive as a result), but I've been a loyal AMD man for years (I'm not techno-religious - but I like supporting the underdog...) and they've never let me down (my system is rock-freakun solid...). Intel was chosen by Apple which was a big boon for Intel, and Intel's triple channel performance is unparalled in AMD-land, but only if you are willing to buy extremely expensive triple channel memory to go with it (90% of people buying Intel think they're gonna get better performance but they dont, because they shy away from the ultra-expensive memory needed to claim the better CPU performance). Consider AMD if your wallet's a little thin right now...

Rob

hsdufhsjkdf wrote:

 

I think AMD will not provide as great an upgrade as Intel, so I will probably take the sandy bridge route.

 

Per dollar, you can get better performance with AMD. You can get a six-core AMD + SSD for about the same money as a quad-core intel (no SSD), and it will run Lightroom faster. Yes, Intel's similarly spec'd systems have the edge performance-wise, but so what?...

PS - I'm not going to keep pushing, just didn't know if you'd thought about it from that angle. Whatever you get will probably be a big improvement...

Good luck with it,

PPS - Did you try searching the forum? (as clvrmnky mentioned - this has been discussed before...)

Rob

As long as you've done enough homework to feel comfortable with your purchase, I'd say "go for it".

I haven't done any formal benchmarks myself.

I was basing my comments on a general understanding of computer architecture / CPUs, and the prices in the US (for non-cutting edge chips, which also provide the best performance per cost ratio).

PS - maybe try searching this forum too (along with the general internet search).

Rob

hsdufhsjkdf wrote:

According this test, the fastest AMD x6 1100 BE CPU is still slower than an i5 2400 when running LR or PS.

The Sandy Bridge CPUs are beasts!  I've been waiting for them to be released so I can upgrade my aging desktop.  If you're OK with over-clocking, the new Core i5 2500k or Core i7 2600k CPUs are almost unbeatable, especially when you crank them up to the 5 GHz range, which they can do surprisingly easy - i.e., without causing the lights to dim and your case to melt down.  If you don't want to build one yourself, you can always get a nice box at Origin PC or one of the other custom computer makers.  It costs more money, but then you can spend more time taking and working on your photos!

In general:

• Lightroom is not, as a rule, IO bound. There may be some corner-cases where all your Lightroom stuff on one disk or partition will bind up RW access (e.g., when importing and creating previews, or saving a lot of metadata to an image file) but this should be rare. It is recommended to separate the raw cache from other stuff to minimize this. Running Lightroom on a catalogue or images accessible via a virtual or networked filesystem may be an exception to this. This is sort of to be expected, though, given the nature and history of such filesystems. You won't see amazing differences between SSDs and SATA, for example.
• Lightroom does not require any special video hardware. And good 2D adapter with decent amounts of memory should do. Many adapters come with junky driver add-ons on Windows that should be avoided. Just install the plain drivers, without any taskbar apps (or disable them.)
• Under reasonable load, Lightroom can be memory bound. It is extremely multi-threaded, and each thread will want memory, and the threads working directly on images will want even more. The recommendation is to run it as a 64-bit app, and make sure you have plenty of physical memory. Folks here typically run 8Gb or more. 8-12GB is the sweet spot, based on anecdotal evidence.
• There are reports that Lightroom may be an app that uncovers a known limitation with "hyperthreading", where the native threads all end up being the same depth. When under the right sort of load, the multi-threaded nature of Lightroom will cause the scheduler to move processing to virtual threads in a manner that causes behaviour that looks like it is CPU bound. Not all users see this, so there may be other factors involved.  But hyperthreading is old tech that has a few known limitations (including the one I just described.) It may be possible to mitigate this by disabling hyperthreading.
• The size of the catalogue has very little to do with overall application load.
• Any sufficiently complex application deployed on commodity hardware running any number of other apps, services and drivers may have performance corner-cases. When trying to solve such problems the only thing to do is work from the known to the unknown, isolating the problem as best you can.

So, don't geek out too much looking at specs. Just get a good high-performance workstation and spring for good memory and a few fast local drives. Use some of that time spent balancing the perfect matrix of hardware specs coming up with a provable backup regimen.

hsdufhsjkdf wrote:

 

Thanks a lot for your help. I just one question for some reassurance:

in the library module the load times when switching from one image to the next is very satisfacory ( 100% reviews have been rendered). Does thismean that I dont need to invest in faster hard drives and that the load times in the develop module can be overcome  simply by buying a faster cpu?

This activity is mostly dependent on disk IO, yes (once the caches are primed and the previews built.)  As long as nothing is interfering with disk IO (not always a sure thing on most Windows systems) your best bang for buck is CPU and memory.

4GB is all you "need" to run Lightroom 3 efficiently, but you have to constantly check ram consumption and watch what else you load... I did it for several months. 8GB is enough for Lightroom plus "light" Photoshop work, plus NX2... And Lightroom is less likely to end up ram starved (8GB is what I've been using for the past few months). I mean if your motherboard only supports 4GB then you're stuck, but if you can afford 8GB, you'll probably be happier (I am). If you have a funny motherboard that likes 6GB or 12GB, you could probably do OK with 6GB, unless you push Photoshop pretty hard or have other ram hungry apps you want to run at the same time as Lightroom.

As long as your graphics card can support the resolution of your monitors, you should be fine.

No graphics bottleneck from what I've experienced, and from what I've heard.

On Jan 26, 2011, Rob Cole wrote:

 

If you have a funny motherboard that likes 6GB or 12GB, you could probably do OK with 6GB, unless you push Photoshop pretty hard or have other ram hungry apps you want to run at the same time as Lightroom.

I'm sure you weren't totally serious, Rob, but I wouldn't call an X58 motherboard "funny."  Intel's Bloomfield (quad core) and Gulftown (six core) Core i7 CPUs require this motherboard.  This CPU/motherboard combination utilizes Intel's triple channel memory interface, which is awesome if you don't mess it up by installing DIMMs in anything other than matched triplets - i.e, by installing *four* 2 GB DIMMs.  You mentioned this triple channel interface yourself earlier in this thread:

On Jan 18, 2011, Rob Cole wrote:

and Intel's triple channel performance is unparalled in AMD-land, but only if you are willing to buy extremely expensive triple channel memory to go with it (90% of people buying Intel think they're gonna get better performance but they dont, because they shy away from the ultra-expensive memory needed to claim the better CPU performance). 

You don't need "extremely expensive" memory to "claim the better CPU performance."  You simply have to purchase the memory in triplets instead of pairs.  You only need faster memory if you want to see the full benefit of overclocking - and even then you won't get very much bang for your buck.

I'm not really picking on you, Rob, just correcting a few things.

In closing, I'd say that 4 (or 6) GB certainly wouldn't be enough for Lightroom if you plan to work on large images or scanned photos.  I tried on my 4 GB system and LR 3.3 was eating 2.3 GB of RAM!

yes i need a graphic card for gaming ;-)

i found an interesting test about the influence of hyperthreading and cuda technologie in adobe 64 bits application :

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adobe-cs5-cuda-64-bit,2770.html

unfortunetly it doesn't talk about lightroom, but I hope Hyperthreading and cuda will be part of LR4 (and i will have to change my graphic card...).