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yuriyg19690579
yuriyg19690579
Participant
August 6, 2018
Answered

Which of these CPUs will provide the best Lightroom performance?

  • August 6, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 1394 views

Intel® Product Specification Comparison

The first is my current one. The second is the best available cpu on a macbook pro, which I'm considering getting. The third is from my understanding considered a very good desktop cpu.

The reason I'm asking is I am considering upgrading my desktop, whether by updating a few elements or switching to a macbook pro so that I can stop bouncing between PC for photo editing and my current, older macbook for day to day stuff.

I'm assuming CPU is my bottleneck -- I have 32gb ram and an nvidia geforce 1060 with 6gb ram. All the data lives on ssd's. I could be wrong, of course --  the ram is only ddr3, for example. And there could be other stuff. There could just be windows rot -- I will do a clean install soon to fix that.


The main thing I'm looking to improve is performance in the develop module. Zooming in 100%, for example, takes a second. Annoying. I do have a 4k monitor and 42mp images, so that naturally doesn't help things.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer dj_paige

The 4790K is an older model that doesn't get as good benchmark scores as the other two. The problem with new MacBook Pro (from what I have read) is that it comes with a 4K or 5K monitor which are known to cause Lightroom slowness. To speed things up even further, you need a powerful GPU, and even then, brushing and/or spot healing will still bring Lightroom to a crawl. These are things people have experienced with Lightroom — I can't say that EVERYONE with this type of hardware experiences this, but there are a lot of similar complaints coming from MacBook Pro users, Lightroom is slow. If you can get an HD monitor (1920x1080), I think then you are in good shape, you have eliminated a major cause of slowness. Memory speed is nearly irrelevant for Lightroom, and memory about 16GB doesn't really add any performance improvement for Lightroom (although you may have other software where memory speed or 32GB is helpful). Also for Lightroom, there is no need to put your photos on an SSD, you won't notice anything but an extremely small speed improvement, if you notice it at all.

2 replies

dj_paige
dj_paigeCorrect answer
Legend
August 6, 2018

The 4790K is an older model that doesn't get as good benchmark scores as the other two. The problem with new MacBook Pro (from what I have read) is that it comes with a 4K or 5K monitor which are known to cause Lightroom slowness. To speed things up even further, you need a powerful GPU, and even then, brushing and/or spot healing will still bring Lightroom to a crawl. These are things people have experienced with Lightroom — I can't say that EVERYONE with this type of hardware experiences this, but there are a lot of similar complaints coming from MacBook Pro users, Lightroom is slow. If you can get an HD monitor (1920x1080), I think then you are in good shape, you have eliminated a major cause of slowness. Memory speed is nearly irrelevant for Lightroom, and memory about 16GB doesn't really add any performance improvement for Lightroom (although you may have other software where memory speed or 32GB is helpful). Also for Lightroom, there is no need to put your photos on an SSD, you won't notice anything but an extremely small speed improvement, if you notice it at all.

Tony_See
Tony_See
Inspiring
August 6, 2018

Have you had a look at these system requirements?

They may help to give your needs some perspective perhaps?

yuriyg19690579
yuriyg19690579Author
Participant
August 6, 2018

I have. I think my question goes far beyond something like that. For example, how does processor bus speed factor into this? # of threads? Etc.

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