Which CPU for Lightroom Classic?

[bienewald-dresden]

Hi there,

I'm planning to buy a new PC. The main work I do with it is using Adobe Lightroom Classic. Since 6 years I'm using a Acer V17 Nitro with an i7-4710. I want to replace it by something faster. I was figuring out, the CPU seems to be the main important component when it comes to speed.

My question, is there still a difference between a Intel i7-10th generation and a Intel i7-11th generation? Or is the performance of both of them over the needs of LR anyway and the 11th generation will not be an improvement from 10th generation? Should I better go for an i9 instead i7?

I would be happy to hear your opinion before I decide. I would rather pay little more for a faster PC which I will use for the next 5 or so years, but if it makes no difference it would be wasted and better invested in cappuccino...

Thanks a lot for your answer and best regards fron Dresden/ Germany, Frank

 

[PhilBurton]

Hi there,

I'm planning to buy a new PC. The main work I do with it is using Adobe Lightroom Classic. Since 6 years I'm using a Acer V17 Nitro with an i7-4710. I want to replace it by something faster. I was figuring out, the CPU seems to be the main important component when it comes to speed.

My question, is there still a difference between a Intel i7-10th generation and a Intel i7-11th generation? Or is the performance of both of them over the needs of LR anyway and the 11th generation will not be an improvement from 10th generation? Should I better go for an i9 instead i7?

I would be happy to hear your opinion before I decide. I would rather pay little more for a faster PC which I will use for the next 5 or so years, but if it makes no difference it would be wasted and better invested in cappuccino...

Thanks a lot for your answer and best regards fron Dresden/ Germany, Frank

Currently AMD's 5900 CPUs are regarded as the best for Lightroom. However, a "Threadripper" would be overkill for Lightroom.

Of course, others may have a different viewpoint.

Phil Burton

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

I upgraded to a Threadripper from a 4 or 5 year old Intel (I forget which, 4 physical cores, 8 virtual). I now have 32 physical cores, 64 virtual.

It's faster, but not a lot faster; I got it for something else really (astrophotography which can do MUCH more parallel processing than Adobe). I was disappointed it wasn't faster.

I want to throw a modern GPU at it to see if that helps, but can't find any for less than scalper prices. Keep that in mind as you shop, you might look for bundles that have a good GPU rather than trying to buy separately.

By the way, I like the Threadripper a lot, it is quite fast for all things, and very fast when you have a program that can spin off 64 threads at once to do processing (like Pixinsight). But Lightroom, while faster, is still something of a dog.

 

[Gnits]

Last December I selected a Ryzen 9, based on my view of best price / performance ratio without getting exotic. In this range, at that time, Ryzen out performed Intel, but I have not kept current with new releases since.

A big consideration , already mentioned, is the GPU. Maybe with China clamping down on BitCoin, GPUs will revert to more normal prices, but factor in the cost of the GPU in your evaluation of options. I found it exceedingly difficult to find any in stock and paid an outrageous price for a gen 1 card. My intention is to upgrade at a future date when/if prices / availability improve. At the time a GPU card with a min of 6GB was recommended.

I installed 2 M2 Pcie Ver 4 sdd drives, the first for the o/s and apps, the second for the Lr. Catalog, Lr and Ps Cache Folders and to hold current years images and projects. Previous years images and projects are kept on a Thunderbolt 3 disk enclosure. Simply, I wanted current image processing to be operating on the fastest drives that were available at realistic prices.
I opted for a motherboard which had Pcie V4 architecture (future proof for future fast i/o operations) , had a Thunderbolt 3 port and could cater for power demands of high end gpu cards, should I need to upgrade at a future date.

I installed 64GB of memory, with option to install 64Gb more if needed, but sense 64Gb is overkill for me for my mix of Lr and Ps processing.

My last build lasted 10 years and is still going strong, only hampered by the need to process 50MB raw files. I opted for the Ryzen and fast M2 drives as the basis for giving me decent performance for the next 5 years and will upgrade GPU whn Adobe can better utilise GPU processing capability and/or Gpus become more available.

Bottom line is the need to balance the cpu with the spec of other components.