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Archive 2023 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

traingoof
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

My old screwdriver PC is taking forever to load Z7 files in Capture One 22, and LR 6.14. Looking at buying the following from
my usual source, Micro Center in Mayfield, OH. I am just a hobbyist that does not take thousands of photos every week, so any advice would certainly be welcome. It's been a long time since I looked at desktop PC parts, old machine has I5 3570K and 16GB of ram.

Tia

Gigabyte Z690 UD AX DDR4 LGA 1700 ATX

Intel I7 12700K Adler Lake CPU

32 GB DDR4 Ram

Heat Sink

I am going to use the current drives, 1 SSD and 3 spinners 2T ea.

GPU was also updated 5 years ago

Mar 10, 2023 at 12:37 PM

EB-1
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

Microcenter usually has some very good bundle deals. The 12700K is certainly a powerful CPU, but you should probably also upgrade the graphics card if it is 5 years old. Some, but not all modern software uses GPU acceleration and can really speed image processing even if you don't care about 3D/gaming performance. A modest 3070 Ti or similar would be a huge improvement.
Make sure you get a good power supply for current and future needs. Probably a 850W is the best compromise for your 253W CPU and allows room for a good GPU and other components.

EBH

Mar 10, 2023 at 12:53 PM

mcbroomf
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

How are the 4 drives connected to your current system? Internal? External? If these are USB (2?) external connections you may not get much of an improvement for load/import. Processing will fly though.

Mar 10, 2023 at 01:26 PM

traingoof
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

Thanks guys for the quick and helpful response. The drives are internal, I have one of those WD external
drives as a back up unit. Also I kind of figured the power supply was not going to make the cut for the
upgrade. Now to start shopping to refurbish and upgrade my non gaming photo / music rig.

Mar 10, 2023 at 03:44 PM

stompyq
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

12th Gen intel chips support DDR5. Why buy that processor and go for a DDR4 board and memory? If you want to stick with DDR4 to save costs maybe you can look at a previous gen processor. Or look at the AMD side of things. Also if you never plan to overclock then save some money and buy the non K version. Spend the money and buy a nVME SSD for your boot drive. That make s a massive difference. Use your other SSD as a scratch disk for PS and the spinners for backup

Edited on Mar 14, 2023 at 12:59 PM · View previous versions

Mar 14, 2023 at 12:48 PM

stompyq
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

EB-1 wrote:
Microcenter usually has some very good bundle deals. The 12700K is certainly a powerful CPU, but you should probably also upgrade the graphics card if it is 5 years old. Some, but not all modern software uses GPU acceleration and can really speed image processing even if you don't care about 3D/gaming performance. A modest 3070 Ti or similar would be a huge improvement.
Make sure you get a good power supply for current and future needs. Probably a 850W is the best compromise for your 253W CPU and allows room for a good GPU and other components.

EBH

I recently updated my 12-year-old Nvidia GTS450 to an intel arc a750. I see very little (if any) difference in performance in Lightroom/Photoshop. If the OP is happy with his GPU I would update that last. The real world gains for photo editing are very low with updated GPU's. Video editing is a different matter. I would also save some money and look at Intel a750/a770 offerings if you don't plan to game. They are half the cost of Nvidia cards and give an equivalent performance to RTX 3060/3070 cards IN GAMING.

Mar 14, 2023 at 12:55 PM

jhapeman
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

stompyq wrote:
I recently updated my 12-year-old Nvidia GTS450 to an intel arc a750. I see very little (if any) difference in performance in Lightroom/Photoshop. If the OP is happy with his GPU I would update that last. The real world gains for photo editing are very low with updated GPU's. Video editing is a different matter. I would also save some money and look at Intel a750/a770 offerings if you don't plan to game. They are half the cost of Nvidia cards and give an equivalent performance to RTX 3060/3070 cards IN GAMING.

What versions of Lightroom and Photoshop are you using though? It matters in the newer versions a good deal, although you are fine with a mid-range card like the new Intel cards or an older-generation Nvidia 3070.

Mar 15, 2023 at 03:24 PM

jhapeman
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

Your version of Lightroom is so out of date that you'd likely see better improvements in performance by updating that than the PC. They have made big gains in performance in recent releases, particularly in versions 11.x and 12.x.

Otherwise, CaptureOne still is pretty weak at CPU utilization and leans a bit more on the GPU than Lightroom. If you're sticking the old version of Lightroom and CaptureOne there's little reason to get a CPU with more than 6 cores, as neither will really use more than that (the newer versions of Lightroom will use as many cores as you can throw at it).

Both applications benefit more from raw core speed in the CPU than anything else, so the faster the GHz the better you are. Both also do well with a good GPU but you don't need a top of the line one as neither software package will really take advantage of it (LR 6.x had very limited GPU acceleration at all). A good Nvidia 3060 card will be fine and you would also be just fine with the lower-cost i5 12600. As others have pointed out, a fast NVMe SSD drive will actually give you more speed benefit than you realize.

Mar 15, 2023 at 04:01 PM

Alan321
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

jhapeman wrote:
(...)Both applications benefit more from raw core speed in the CPU than anything else, so the faster the GHz the better you are. (...)

I disagree, in so far as any post-2019 version of LrC can benefit greatly from using multiple CPU cores to build previews in batches and that can trump a faster CPU with fewer cores. However, this depends on the rest of the system being able to feed image data to LrC quickly enough so, for example, it works better with a well-connected NVMe SSD than with any HDD.

Edited on Mar 16, 2023 at 07:46 AM · View previous versions

Mar 16, 2023 at 07:28 AM

Alan321
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

traingoof, if you upgrade the computer and also upgrade LrC to a recent version, then you might find that 32GB will be more limiting than it used to be five years ago. At the very least, make sure you can add more later on without trashing what you are about to buy.

If you stick with LrC v 6 then its single-core processing will be the weakest link in any new computer you might buy, because you'll miss out on multi-threaded preview building and GPU processing. I might be exaggerating but I would expect Lr 6 to undermine much of the benefit of a new PC.

Then again, an upgrade from Lr 6 to LrC 12 will cause a shock to your system because the basic editing features work differently and there are many new features to learn and benefit from. You'll need a strategy to manage the change because you won't want to ruin old edits before you understand the new edits. Even so, within a few months you'll probably have updated all of your image edits. I recommend that you not let the new LrC or old Lr write anything to old raw files or sidecar files. Instead, manage your edits in the LrC database and keep it backed up automatically after every session.

Mar 16, 2023 at 07:45 AM

jhapeman
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

Alan321 wrote:
I disagree, in so far as any post-2019 version of LrC can benefit greatly from using multiple CPU cores to build previews in batches and that can trump a faster CPU with fewer cores. However, this depends on the rest of the system being able to feed image data to LrC quickly enough so, for example, it works better with a well-connected NVMe SSD than with any HDD.

Yes, but you failed to read what he wrote--he's using the 2017 version of LrC, and that's hamstrung at 6 cores max. That's also why I told him to consider upgrading LR, as there have been a lot of performance gains made in that product since 2017.

Mar 16, 2023 at 10:53 AM

jeffbuzz
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

Balance is the key to optimal computer performance. Putting a few new, fast components in a PC with much older components may not give you the boost you're hoping for. There will always be a bottleneck at whatever the slowest component is. The key is to balance all the components so the slowest piece of the data pipeline is not too much slower than the fastest part. Otherwise you're wasting money on the fast part(s).

I am not looking at your specific list. That's up to you. The point is to know whether your CPU is 10x faster than your RAM or if your network is only 1/10th as fast as your storage. If so, you'd be better off buying faster network devices or RAM to reduce the bottleneck.

Unless you can invest the time to research each piece and how it relates to the other components, I recommend looking at pre-built machines. Decent pre-built units are configured with well balanced parts so there is not a single glaring bottleneck slowing down a bunch of higher speed components.

Mar 16, 2023 at 12:47 PM

goalerjones
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

13th gen Intel has noticeably faster speeds over 12th gen. I returned my i7 12700k and got the i7 13700k since it came out a week after. I was coming from an Intel i5 5400, and a Nvidia 1060 3gb GPU. I was using a mini ATX MB so I had no M.2 slots and was using all SSD's and it was becoming too slow for file transfers. Now I've got a Gigabyte AERO MB 4 m.2 slots, currently 2 M.2 drives, and will add another soon and this thing flies. I went with the DDR4 RAM as it's cheaper, and there are still lots of problems getting what you're paying for out of DDR5 RAM. GPU was updated as well to an RTX 3060.

I will say this about pre-built machines. While the package might be cheaper and the components are compatible, they save money by using off brand fillers, and their build methods often means you can't re-use parts once you decide to upgrade again, and so the whole thing is a one-off.

Mar 17, 2023 at 12:41 AM

rico
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Time for PC upgrade, are any of these overkill?

Every kid in my circle appears capable of building their own PCs from parts. That includes my own 15-year old daughter with a little help from me. Amazon delivered everything I needed in under 24 hours (on a Sunday). Except to a true hardware newbie, I recommend this route for reasons of cost, quality, and maintainability. The online references for parts selection and assembly subtleties is amazing—nothing like I had in the 1980s!

Mar 17, 2023 at 06:07 PM


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