Processor Upgrade

Hi people,

Firstly the boring bits:
Camera - Sony A6000
Computer
- MSI Gaming 3 socket 1150 Motherboard
- Intel Pentium G3258K OC to 4.6ghz)
- 16gb 1600mhz DDR3
- VTX3D Radeon 7770 1ghz
- 3x 2tb HDD
- 1x 128 SSD (for lightroom files i'm currently editing)
- 650W EVGA PSU

So i'm having some issues with my current build, the main issue i am having is tha slow conversion / export times. I've noticed that my CPU usage is rocketing (maxing out about 99% on both cores) when exporting or converting to DNG. Lightroom is also a bit laggy when making adjustments.

So i was thinking my current limiting factor is my CPU.

Now..... do i go for the Intel i7 processors or jump for a Xeon?what would the i7 give over the Xeon or vica versa?

Heya,

If you're running Lightroom 6 (or the latest creative suite), you will benefit from extra cores if I remember correctly. Get the fastest cores possible, don't worry about cache and stuff as much, you just need several fast clock speed cores. An i7 is the way to go for the cash. I doubt you'd see a meaningful difference with an equivalent Xeon relative to the cost difference. Personally I would not worry about overclocking it much, as the last thing you want to happen is instability and crashing during important work. It will be fast enough.

Very best,

Thanks for the reply, I'm not too fussed about overclocking but i thought with the handicap of only 2 cores my OC from 3.2 to 4.6 would be an improvement, it seemed to have worked fine when i was using my 1D Mk3 but now i guess with more MP to play with it's not quite cutting the mustard. would you think there is a big enough gap between an i5 and i7 to warrant the increase in cost?

urbanfreestyle wrote in post #18000519
Thanks for the reply, I'm not too fussed about overclocking but i thought with the handicap of only 2 cores my OC from 3.2 to 4.6 would be an improvement, it seemed to have worked fine when i was using my 1D Mk3 but now i guess with more MP to play with it's not quite cutting the mustard. would you think there is a big enough gap between an i5 and i7 to warrant the increase in cost?

Heya,

The latest i5's are excellent and the best bang for buck is the i5. But if you're wanting to top out performance, within reason, the i7 still has the muscle advantage and beats the good I5's with room to spare in multi-thread and single-core performance. I'm comparing the i5 6500 and the i7 4970k basically though, not even the top end i7's. The i5 6500 is easily the best processor for the dollar (ie, budget). The 4970k i7 beats it in everything, and is older, but has more muscle. Granted, you could overclock the i5 6500 to get more performance, but as I was saying, I'd suggest keeping it simple if this is for work and not just for playing around. The i5 6500 is $200 (USD) and the i7 4970k is $299 (USD), so in my market, it's worth it as the performance is significantly different. I'm not sure about the UK market, so it may be a bigger gap, which would make the 6500 a smarter purchase depending on cost. For just raw performance though, and reasonable cost, the i7 is it.

Very best,

Thanks again,

the i5 here is approx £150-£170
i7 is approx £270-£280

so about £100 difference. I might have to keep my eyes open for a good priced i7 or just summon up the faith an go for the i5. I think either way it will be a noticable increase in performance?

Heya,

If Lightroom 6 is your primary means of editing (I assume?) then look at the following to get an idea of performance:

https://www.pugetsyste​ms.com …lti-Core-Performance-649/

Having more than 5~6 physical cores doesn't add performance, there's a bottleneck some where at that point, so those 10+ core processors like Xeons are not going to give you more performance really. This is why a 4 core is basically best for cost right now in this application, because you do get performance increase going from 2 cores to 4 cores, significantly. But after 4 cores, it curves off steeply. So getting a 6 core or 8 core really wouldn't add performance for cost benefits. But going from 2 core to 4 core has very significant increases in performance, it scales nicely there.

Going to 4 physical cores and a faster clock, you should see significant gains.

So moving to an i5 6500 from your current CPU should be significant. And the i7 will be a bit better, with higher clock speeds.

I'm willing to bet that the real world difference in Lightroom between the i5 6500 and an i7 probably isn't enough to truly fuss about. But, you'd have to specifically search comparisons of Adobe software (make sure it's recent, not before LR 6, as LR 6 is where multi-core performance comes in, prior to that, it's all single core performance) running on i5 6500 vs i7 4970k to really see if there's a difference in the architecture, and not simply the clock speed differences (cores not counted, as you see, beyond 4 cores it really doesn't add much if anything).

Very best,

yeah i have the adobe phgotography bundle, Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC all up to date and the latest.

Just noticed that the processors mentioned are skylake and i'm looking at sticking with Haswell for the moment....

My post may be misplaced, since you already state that your processor is maxing out when exporting....

But in noticed you said your using your SSD for you are editing.
Where are your exporting them photos to?

The other bottle neck in speed may be your writing speed of the drive.

I had a stock 60gb SSD in my Mac Air but the writing speed would max out around 100MB/s
Now I have a 3rd party 240gb SSD and the writing speed is around 500Mb/s

I export my finished photos to my SSD first, then copy them to an external drive that write about 90Mb/s
Big difference in time spent, and I am on a 2012 Mad Air core duo with 8gb of ram and Lightroom 5

Long story short, if your ARE writing your files direct to one of your 2TB HDD's they may no be able to write fast.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the reply, I am writing from my ssd back to an folder on the same ssd. It's Samsung 840 I think.

The 4770k and 4790k have excellent overclocking documentation/support at http://www.overclock.n​et …ing-guide-with-statistics.

You can't do better than this without going to a 6700k, which means a new build.

i5 good, i7 a little better for exports. SSD for input and output isn't typically an issue for RAW conversion, it really is CPU limited, using two disks wouldn't help performance.

sounds like i need to keep my eyes out for an i5 or if i can afford it the i7, will be clocking both so all good