ok i know my desktop is getting on a little but its been ok with LR3 and CS5 .
current specs are:
Pentium Dual Core E5200 2.5ghz
Win Vista 64bit
4Gig Ram
so I downloaded the trial of LR4 and find it very 'laggy' . so I've decided its time for an upgrade. I cant put loads of £££ into the very top of the line components .
the best £ v performance I can see is a core i5 2500 . It seems I can pick up an i5 and M/board for about £200 .
question is would I notice a difference (and how much) if i stick 16gig of ram in there over 8gig?
If it makes much difference my current body is a 7D which is quite new. I did notice a slight performance hit when I used the 7D files in LR3 . but the converse of that is LR4 is still just as laggy with my old 40D and mk2n files which were fine in LR3 .
or am I barking up the wrong tree ? should I be adding something else to my current system .
By the way looking at memory prices it seems that swapping out my current 4gig of memory for 8 gig (DDR2) would cost me half of what the new stuff above would cost (DDR2 seems very expensive now) so does not seem a good option.
Ian, a couple of years ago I upgraded from a Core2Duo E6750 (2.2GHz) to an i5-750 overclocked to 3.7GHz. I don't use Lightroom, but the difference for everything was like night and day, particularly for video encoding. It was ~4X faster than the old system. A few months ago I upgraded the motherboard & CPU to run an i5-2500K which I'm running at 4.7GHz. While not as dramatic a difference as going from the C2D to the i5-750, I would say that the i5-2500K is ~2X the speed of the older i5.
I would suggest that you get the i5-2500K. In the US, it costs ~$10 more than the non-K version. However, the K version is unlocked and allows you to overclock it (it overclocks very nicely). While you may not want to overclock initially, it's always nice to have the option to do so later on. Also, I would suggest that you look for a motherboard using an Intel Z68 chipset. The Z68 allows you to take advantage of the Intel HD Graphics (quite good) and supports overclocking. The other chipsets (P67 & H67) support one or the other, but not both.
To answer your original question, I don't think that you would notice a difference in performance between 16GB of RAM and 8GB of RAM. You might be able to measure a difference using benchmark testing, but I doubt it would be noticeable in use.
I would make sure that you buy full speed (7,200rpm) drives rather than the "green" slower drives. I notice a substantial difference when I utilize images off my slow backup drives vs my full speed work drives.
I went AMD. I got a motherboard with 16 G of RAM. The board is capable of handling 32 GB, which I suggest you get because future RAM prices will be cheaper (as always).
When you buy RAM, buy and replace as matched sets. In other words, if you buy two 4 GB sticks for 8 GB now and put another 8 GB in later, it may lead to some instability. To upgrade, sell the 8 GB and replace with 4 sticks of 4 GB for 16 GB (as an example).
Just read THIS post by Jeff Schewe on the LL Forum. It addresses this question. He makes a great point about having the increased RAM for Photoshop. So, if you use Photoshop, and especially if you use LR with Photoshop, then the 16GB of RAM may make a difference. I hadn't thought of that.
the difference between 8G and 16G of RAM depends on many things but especially on the sizes of your images and the number of images in your catalogs. the incremental price difference shouldn't be much compared to the price of everything else you are considering so i suggest try to go to 16G. incidentally, my main computer system has 72G of RAM. i'm well past the point of diminishing returns for Lightroom but having that much RAM makes sense for large panorama stitches. half a gigapixel stitching requires about 40G of RAM and a whole lot of parallel processing power. Lightroom can use lots of processors but is much more disk speed bound than panorama stitching.
Herb...
Ian.Dobinson wrote:
so I downloaded the trial of LR4 and find it very 'laggy' . so I've decided its time for an upgrade. I cant put loads of £££ into the very top of the line components .
the best £ v performance I can see is a core i5 2500 . It seems I can pick up an i5 and M/board for about £200 .
question is would I notice a difference (and how much) if i stick 16gig of ram in there over 8gig?
If you're using a dual-core cpu now, you will get a big increase going to quad core, which LR will use to advantage.
You will see a significant advantage going from 4 gigs of ram to 8 gigs, but maybe not in LR going to 16 gigs. I didn't see much effect even in PS going from 8 to 16 gigs, even with the large files from a 5D2 camera.
However, if you do use PS, I noted that some PS plug-ins will go to the scratch drive even if you have ample ram. So I put 4 gigs of my 16 into a ram drive (freeware download) and identified that to PS as my first scratch drive. It made a big difference in the speed of some of my plugins (particularly Topaz Adjust).
I doubt going from 4GB to 16 GB will make much of a noticeable difference, since LR only uses a couple Gigs in RAM most of the time anyway. You would only notice it of course if you like to keep many applications open simultaneously.
I just put together a new system and my LR3 now runs like a rocket ship. From what I can see, the biggest LR speed improvements were gained from:
More cores (or specifically more threads): Adobe has done an excellent job implementing hyper-threading technology so the more cores/threads available the better. A quad core cpu will be better than a dual core, and a multi-threaded quad core even better still. My new system is based on the hex core i7 3930K - 6 cores/12 threads - and LR3 uses every one of them. Particularly when I import images, all 12 threads load up nicely and full size 5DII RAW files are converted to DNG and pop up 12 at a time, at a rate of 1 per second!
SSD drive: The LR application opens up almost instantaneously from an SSD drive and adjustments are instantaneous as well.
LR catalog and RAW preview cache: I actually set up a second smaller SSD Drive (64 GB) strictly as a dedicated cache drive for the LR Catalog/thumbnail files and the RAW Preview cache. Also, the default size for the RAW cache is quite small (like a couple of GB) so I increased mine to 25 GB (to prevent older previews from being dropped). Now things like panning, openeing an image in Develop, and clicking on the 1:1 view are essentially instantaneous as well.
nathanlake wrote:
There are reports coming out now that LR4 may have some performance issues.
yeah I've seen a little bit as well.
anyway I've decided that I'm staying LR3 for a little while yet. the system upgrade will come in a couple of months . maybe I can wait till win8 is actually released
the 2500K with a z68 M/board and 16gig will be my shopping list .
my copies of LR uses all the RAM it can get on 64-bit systems. the incremental gain might not be a lot but it doesn't limit itself to a couple of gig. try opening a 200MP-500MP Photoshop file in LR.
Herb...
matanuska wrote:
I doubt going from 4GB to 16 GB will make much of a noticeable difference, since LR only uses a couple Gigs in RAM most of the time anyway. You would only notice it of course if you like to keep many applications open simultaneously.
unless the image files are there too, not on any of my systems with SSD and with multiple terrabytes of image files, that means making the workflow more complex.
Herb...
matanuska wrote: SSD drive: The LR application opens up almost instantaneously from an SSD drive and adjustments are instantaneous as well.
HerbChong wrote:
unless the image files are there too, not on any of my systems with SSD and with multiple terrabytes of image files, that means making the workflow more complex.
Herb...
I didn't say anything about workflow. Even if you keep all of the source image files on traditional spinning drives (as I do), moving the Catalogs, Caches, and Previews to fast SSD's will most definitely improve speed and performance.
And if your Catalogs are to big for a single SSD, all that means is you require larger RAID volumes like spanned or striped SSD's. I didn't say it would be cheap either, just that it can be done!
matanuska wrote:
I didn't say anything about workflow. Even if you keep all of the source image files on traditional spinning drives (as I do), moving the Catalogs, Caches, and Previews to fast SSD's will most definitely improve speed and performance.
And if your Catalogs are to big for a single SSD, all that means is you require larger RAID volumes like spanned or striped SSD's. I didn't say it would be cheap either, just that it can be done!
I agree with that. I moved my catalogs and cache to SSDs a couple years ago. Very expensive then, but the increase in speed was considerable. I have since replaced those drives with bigger (and cheaper drives). I won't go back to spinning platters again.
Guys, Ian asked for help with an upgrade. He didn't ask for a one-upsmanship display of specs by people with more money to spend. He's also not doing weird things with his 7D... he's simply got an upgrade question. Can we focus on helping him instead of having a "mine is bigger than yours" moment?
Back to Ian's upgrade:
1. My first suggestion is to look at AMD as a price/performance option. I'm quite happy with their six-core Phenom II processors.
2. I also agree that SSD's are a godsend if you can afford them. If you can't, I'd suggest you make sure that your new mobo has RAID-0 capability and then put two, or even three, hard drives in there. Using multiple hard drives will not improve your seek times, but it will give you some serious transfer rates, and it's not too expensive a solution.
3. Check the price difference between 8GB and 16GB of RAM when you get to the point of actually shopping, and decide then, OK? In the system I just built, the difference was around $50 so, although I don't really need the extra RAM, I can afford the $50 and figure out how best to use it. There's always a way, and RAM is usually a scarce resource. Plus, as mentioned it's always better to use RAM in matched sets... so if you have to sell a set and buy another one to upgrade, you're going to lose some money which argues for maybe installing a little more than what you were planning to put in the first time around.
2. I also agree that SSD's are a godsend if you can afford them. If you can't, I'd suggest you make sure that your new mobo has RAID-0 capability and then put two, or even three, hard drives in there. Using multiple hard drives will not improve your seek times, but it will give you some serious transfer rates, and it's not too expensive a solution.
The "need for speed" in data transfer is mostly for the scratch disk. A 32- or 64-gig SSD these days might be no more expensive than two platter drives for a striped RAID setup.
Point taken, and your pricing perception is spot-on.
I need larger capacities (I can go through 200+ GB a day in extreme cases), so I don't keep track of smaller drives. But in a quick check just now, I did find a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD with fantastic user reviews for $94, and there are other good options in the $80-$90 range. Those costs will continue to come down, so hopefully they'll be within the OP's reach by the time he's ready to purchase.
tried it. not true unless your image files are there too.
Herb...
matanuska wrote:
I didn't say anything about workflow. Even if you keep all of the source image files on traditional spinning drives (as I do), moving the Catalogs, Caches, and Previews to fast SSD's will most definitely improve speed and performance.
HerbChong wrote:
tried it. not true unless your image files are there too.
Herb...
In my experience Lr is definitely faster with one SSD or with two than with a single HDD. If you have a high-spec HDD RAID system (internal or eSATA) then the difference may not be as significant.
I just don't see how Lr could *not* perform faster with an SSD. Everything you do in Lr involves at least some reading from and writing to the Lr catalog and/or the Lr preview cache and/or the ACR raw cache and/or .xmp files and/or the image files. How could all that drive activity possibly be faster or even as fast on a HDD than a decent SSD ? The HDD has much slower access times, especially when files are distributed all over the drive, and also slower transfer rates.
The benefits of SSD are even greater if you are running low on RAM or are restricted to a single drive (provided that it has sufficient capacity).
