Are i3 processors worth the cheaper price?

My current desktop is just a joke. Horrible mess of oldness and brokeness. It has an Intel Pentium dual core 2.4ghz and 2gb of RAM. Very slow, not to mention that it's a second-hand computer given to us a few years back and it has all kinds of goofy software on it that is hard to remove. It's just nonsense.

Looking at various deals online and around town it seems that I can get a computer with 500 gb or 1Tb hard drive, 8gb of RAM, and a 3.2ghz processor for a little over $400, but with an i5 that system generally runs about a hundred more.

I'm wondering if the dual core i3 will be enough.

My needs are pretty simple:

Canon's Raw software
LIghtroom
Photoshop Elements
Web browser open at the same time (for other work, etc.)
Microsoft Word (rarely open during photo processing but sometimes is).

I don't do video or gaming of any kind. All video I do is cheap, family stuff that I process on the Ipad and film with a phone.

Thanks for any advice. I really don't do intense computing. 90% of what I do is processing and converting raw files to TIFFs (or Jpegs if finished) and then I fine tune in Photoshop Elements.

The difference I saw was enough for me to go with a quad core processor. I saved and bought an AMD A8 equipped machine that has 8GB RAM and 1TB data. Then added a 256GB SSD boot drive myself. The speed was just as fast as the i7 when using Lr5.4 and PSE11

Sounds like my machine. I am going to get a new motherboard processor combo (i5)and memory and hard drive and reuse everything else. should be about 400 to do it.

Honestly, go for the i5 option.

While i3s are probably capable enough, the i5 will offer you considerably more grunt for the extra cash you pay for it. i5s are generally regarded as offering some of the best bang for your buck performance. For example, I am running an i5 2500k in my PC, which is now over three years old and it is still perfectly capable of outperforming most stuff I throw at it.

As DBNissan says, the jump from Dual Core to Quad Core is definitely worthwhile.

Whether or not i3s are worth the savings really depends on the kind of work loads you are dealing with, and the volume of number crunching you are expecting.

The newest versions are decent processors for the price, but they will bog down more than an i5 if you are exporting large numbers of photos at a time, or encoding more than a few minutes of video at a time.

However may I suggest skipping on the idea of an SSD for the time being if your budget is tight? Going with a newer model i5 and at least 8 gigs of ram in a system relying on old style disks will more likely preform better on most tasks than a similar system using an i3 and an SSD.

SSD will improve an already good system. They will however have a minimal impact on a system that is under powered. They do make things feel snappier, shaving off a second here and there as you're working, but in general they don't offer a vast improvement to the raw number crunching on things like exporting photos or dealing with larger/complex filters/processes.

And you can always upgrade to an SSD down the road, just make sure the system you get/build has extra drive bays open if you're going for a desktop unit. (One of the reasons why I treat a laptop as a 'secondary' system if I'm not expecting to be on the road constantly. So much cheaper to build a beefy desktop than trying to cram everything into a laptop. They just get big and heavy then.)

Also I would take multiple standard harddrives and an external drive or two for duplication and backup of files before I add an SSD to a system.

No.

Thanks for the info. So the AMD 8 is decent?

anything newer would be more than enough. im using an e5400 with 2g of ram so its nothing special, but after reinstalling the OS and putting in an ssd the system flies. However if I was upgrading to a whole new system I would also go with the i5 over the i3, which is exactly what I did when building my friends setup. I got a haswell i5 paired with 8g of ram an ssd. The first time she or her employees used it they couldnt believe how fast it was. Getting an ssd makes using the computer a whole new experience

EOS-Mike wrote in post #16869457
Thanks for the info. So the AMD 8 is decent?

Yes. I've been happy with it. I went from a first gen i7 with 8GB RAM and 1.5GB Nvidia GPU to the AMD A8 with 8GB RAM and on-board Radeon GPU and it feels a bit faster rendering images. You can upgrade/build an AMD A8 or A10 system for less than $400. Check Neweggs Shell Shocker deals as they often have system build bundles for cheap.

You really want all the CPU power you can afford for creative work. I have an i7 and wish for more power when it comes time to render previews or output JPGs in LightRoom.

Well, I stretched the budget a bit and it should be alright. I ordered a dell with 4th gen i5, 3.3 ghz quadcore, 8gb of ram and a TB of hard drive. It'll have to do. Can't be anything nearly as bad as the jazz I'm using now.

Now, I have to figure out a monitor for down the road (current one is 19.5 inch Dell whatever).

i5 over i3, mostly because i3 are entry level. Lightroom does use more cores, but some parts are single threaded so a high clock speed can be beneficial. i7 isn't necessary, I bought one just because the price wasn't that much higher - still happy on my i7 2700K, stock clock.

SSD will make things feel heaps faster. 120GB Samsung 840 is a good deal, I have the pro version which most people don't need.