C2D Q vs. i7 for LR

[drogos]

Anyone made the jump already ??? Will LR utilize all 8 logical cores? Will i920 give me a huge leap over say Q6600. Yes I know it's expensive, my family makes sure I am aware of this :). Let's stick to the pure performance comparison. THX

[tim]

I had a look at this not long ago, check out this thread (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=598938). I suspect if price is no object then the i7 will give you fantastic performance. I know CS4 takes good advantage of the four cores I have, no using them all 100% but using most of them most of the time, so it'll probably use eight cores just as well.

[Quad]

As far as hyperthreading it will not help within one program as it only uses unutilized parts of the cpu from one operation for another operation. So unless you are using a program that does something that LR is not doing there is nothing for those parts to do. So maybe you can compress audio in the background. I found it good in the past for some simple multutasking. If my machine was busy doing a bulk job I could get the browser to be a bit more responsive. The real cores are a different matter.

I wonder how much hyperthreading will help on multicore machines as before with single core machine that sort of thing really was noticable.

I have not used lightroom but photoshop certainly spools off enough threads to use 8 cores but some of those threads may be timers or doing something else that take up no cpu time. Next month I will have access to an 8 core machine and will do some sort of photoshop tests to see how may cores are used and maybe how much. I will see if I can find something to graph thread count or something.

For photoshop I find memory to be one of the big things that helps my machines. I often work on larger (but not multigig) files so that may be why but even with 8GB of memory my swap files would be 12 GB often. The X58 chipset will handle 24 GB of memory but you would need 4GB sticks of RAM as the motherboards I have seen all have 6 slots and I have seen no 4GB DDR3 RAM yet. 12 GB may be enough for most people though. Everyone has to see for themselves what they can use. DDR2 memory certainly is cheap and some chipsets (P45) can use 16GB of DDR2.

I think a balanced machine is best between memory, CPU speed/quantity and harddrive speed. And now video card is getting some attention. That way the machine does not suddenly have to wait for a long time for something like a large file save. Photoshop does use lots of hardware components for sure.

[jdizzle]

I'm at the point of getting all my parts soon and I'm def. going i7 965. I build my PCs based on gaming and I really love the speed! :) The 920 is def. the bang for your buck and it's plenty fast for post processing. Here's a review at Maximum PC where they compare the Intel i7 965, Intel Quad 9770, and Amd's Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition. When you get to the benchmarks, the i7 was faster over the 9770 by just a tad. Not that you would really notice it but, the i7 965 is much cheaper than the 9770. Hope this helps in your decision.

Link:http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/core_i7_disected_and_benchmarked_everything_you_ne ed_know_about_intels_nextgen_cpu

[HankScorpio]

I've just ordered an i7 920 system with 12GB RAM so I'll let you know hopefully sometime next week how it performs with LR and CS4.

As for performance, the benchmarks I've read say that even the 920 is considerably faster than the fastest Core 2 Quad Extreme.

[drogos]

I've just ordered an i7 920 system with 12GB RAM so I'll let you know hopefully sometime next week how it performs with LR and CS4.

As for performance, the benchmarks I've read say that even the 920 is considerably faster than the fastest Core 2 Quad Extreme.
Great !!! let me know. Do you use LR at all? If so, any chance you could time batch export of say 100 raw files into jpgs with the old system and then new?

[HankScorpio]

Sure, no problem, I use LR 2.

EDIT:
Current system
AMD FX60
2GB RAM
Windows Vista 32bit
Lightroom 2.1

100 uncropped 40D RAW files exported to full size JPEG = 7 Mins 12 seconds.

[luukie]

http://tweakers.net/reviews/1024/4/het-nieuwe-intel-core-i7-platform-getest-pagina-4.html

This site had a review and a comparison of the two platforms. It's in dutch though, but the graphs says it all. Scores are (most of them) in seconds, so lower is better...

[tim]

I've just ordered an i7 920 system with 12GB RAM so I'll let you know hopefully sometime next week how it performs with LR and CS4.

As for performance, the benchmarks I've read say that even the 920 is considerably faster than the fastest Core 2 Quad Extreme.

I'll be very interested to see the results with the i920.

[drogos]

I'll be very interested to see the results with the i920.

Tim, you have Q6600 right ? is it OC'ed or stock. Care to share your 100 files batch processing time? You have 40D too so we would have decent comparison

[tim]

Already done (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=592787) (2 min 20 sec).. I'm overclocked a little to 2.7GHz for now so the results will be a little faster, nothing huge though.

[HankScorpio]

Sure, no problem, I use LR 2.

EDIT:
Current system
AMD FX60
2GB RAM
Windows Vista 32bit
Lightroom 2.1

100 uncropped 40D RAW files exported to full size JPEG = 7 Mins 12 seconds.
Well my new system finally came.

Intel i7 920
12GB DDR3 RAM (yes 12)
Vista 64bit
Lightroom 2.1 (for this test, now up to 2.2)

The same 100 uncropped 40D RAW files exported to full size JPEG = 1 min 56 seconds.

I'm happy.

Oh and LR 2.2 did it in 1 min 47 seconds.

[Motley]

Well my new system finally came.

Intel i7 920
12GB DDR3 RAM (yes 12)
Vista 64bit
Lightroom 2.1 (for this test, now up to 2.2)

The same 100 uncropped 40D RAW files exported to full size JPEG = 1 min 56 seconds.

I'm happy.

Oh and LR 2.2 did it in 1 min 47 seconds.

Very nice, what mobo?

[HankScorpio]

ASUS P6T Deluxe.

[Aszental]

Mmmm 20 seconds faster for the i7 than the q6600, is it really worth teh cash for the upgrade?

Doesn't seem that significant

[tim]

It also depends on software. As software gets better and takes advantage of more cores and more memory bandwidth you'll make better use of the i7. Also multitasking will be MUCH faster on the i7, with it's 8 virtual cores. You never know where the bottleneck is, it could be disk, bus, or RAM.

But it this way - budget machine go Core2, for a faster machine that will last longer go i7. There's even a chance you can upgrade the i7 to an 8 core/16 virtual core machine in a couple of years pretty cheap with no other changes required.