[kwetiaw]

I know it has been asked previously on another thread but I thought I will start again.
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/digital-processing-software-printing/1364...program-2.html

Post processing is equally important part of the photography, if you have a decent and up to date fast computer to post process the photos, it will allow you to finish quickly and take that camera out for a walk again. dont you agree?

Here's my current specs
i5-2500 CPU @3.3Ghz
4GB RAM
250GB HDD 7200rpm
Built-in Intel HD Video Card

I am looking to add more RAM to 16GB and 1GB or 2GB PCIe Video Card. I primarily uses Adobe Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS4, when both programs are running it uses up to 2GB RAM + other programs such as Chrome browsers, leaving around 1GB or less free.

What do you guys have and how do you deal with sluggishness?

[boriscleto]

Early 2009 Mac mini running OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion
Core 2 Duo @ 2 Ghz
8GB RAM
320GB HDD 5400rpm, 1.5TB USB2 HDD
NVIDIA GeForce 9400m w/ 256MB shared RAM

I use Aperture 3.4.3 and Pixelmator 2.1.3. Even with this very old setup I rarely have any sluggishness. The only time I see a SBoD (Spinning Beachball of Death) is when I try to use PDCU.

[photolady95]

New 8 core
Gigabyte GA-970A- D3 Full ATX Motherboard;AMD FX 8120 3.1Ghz; Corsair Vengeance 8GB Memory; 60GB SSD; 640GB WD; Geforce 550 Ti 1GB Vid card; Windows 7 Professional 64 bit; Antec Three Hundred Mid tower
Built by Me!!

I have only Photoshop Elements vers. 9 and I use FastStone, too.

And I built this system for less than $500. Sometimes I wish I had a Mac but I'd still want to build my own.

So, to answer your question......I don't have any slowness or ram outage on my computer.

[Schmidlapper]

2011 27" IMac 3.4 Ghz i7 eight core
16Gig mem, AMD Radion 6970m 2Gig
2TB hd. OS X 10.8.2, backed up to 3TB Timecapsule
Canon Pixima MG6100
Post Processing Software: Aperture 3, PS Elements Editor 10, Nik Software Plugin suite, PortraitProfesional Pro 64 v11. SnapHeal, and BorderFX plugin.

A real dream system for post processing photos on.

[Chaos_Realm]

My Specs from the 'puter I built a few years ago now... before photography was a priority. I am due for an update but that means Mother Board RAM SSD and CPU which costs money lol
Plus I am waiting for DDR4 RAM to get into the system, no point buying DDR3 motherboard and CPU at this point as it leaves no upgrade path really.

Processor: Intel Q9450 2.66Ghz Quad Core, If I am doing something demanding I'll overclock to 2.9-3.2GHz
Ram: 4Gb DDR2 800Mhz
Motherboard: Asus P5Q Premium
HDD: Gskill 64GB SSD, Segate 1.5TB in the Box plus about 5TB of drives I swap through a dock.
Case: Antec 900
Graphics: ATI Radeon 5870 1Gb
PSU: 800W Thermaltake
OS: Windows 7 ultimate N

As for the sluggishness, when your run programs that are intense such as PS and LR there are a number of choke points. In no particular order and divided into upgrade options or maintenance/Tweaking options:

Upgrades:

• your HDD is probably one. I would look at getting an SSD to run your PS and LR from separate to the operating system, they have next to zero latency and significantly faster read/write speeds. if you wish to stick with this you can improve it's performance... See Maintenance.
• RAM is another. I only have 4GB and will occasionally max it out when doing some stacking with LR and PS open + I use Firefox which is a little more demanding than chrome on the Ram side of things. 16GB should last a while, and is one of the best bang for buck performance upgrades.
• Graphics. This is important if you are running a monitor with large colour gamut as some cards don't produce enough bit depth in the colours for decent monitors. the GB's are not a huge thing at this point nearly all cards come with at least 1gb which is plenty.
• CPU should be ok if you do your maintenance.... see maintenance.
• PSU.... or Power supply unit, if your have gone along and made updates, GPU especially, you might find it sucks more juice than your current one can supply and make for some stability issues.

Maintenance/tweaking:

• if you have a disk drive (not solid state) then regular defrag is essential to performance. Defragging SSD will shorten their life.
• remove the junk programs, it will reduce the number of processes running in the background.... I like CCleaner (aka Crap cleaner). It allows you to do most important stuff from the one place. Also let you scan the registry and clean up all the traces left by programs when you uninstall them (it's free).
• you can go down the line of Overclocking. CPU RAM, motherboard GPU but you will need to know what your doing otherwise you can fry stuff. I think this is unnecessary for you.
• Clean inside the box to keep things in there cool and prolong their life . A can of compressed inert gas (not air) will do. compressed air has moisture. Moisture + computer innerds = BAD.
• Back up everything to external drive
• Back up everything to external drive
• Back up everything to external drive or cloud... just encase you forget!

There is probably a whole bunch of things I missed by this is just a start.. and it's 1:45am so I am probably a zombie by this stage... no quite sure though.

[davidreilly3207]

I just purchased a computer with a quad-core AMD processor with built in graphics, similar specs to yours, 64bit OS and 10gb of ram. The speed of loading photos and responsiveness of sliders in Lightroom is lightning fast, compared to my old duo-core 32 bit OS and maxed 4gb of ram(most that 32 bit OS systems can use). I have cut down on my post processing time by at least half (subjective guess). If you have a 64 bit OS, More ram is definitely the way to go, at least 16gb, more so than a new video card as the built in graphics are generally quite adequate for photo-editing. If you also want to edit video or game, then go ahead and replace the graphics for the improvement to frames-per-second they provide. Buy the fastest ram you can install in your system (check your motherboard specs, no sense in wasting money on speed you can't use) , buy 16gb of quality, name brand ram and replace all the ram you have as matched ram will generally work a whole lot better than unmatched ram. I actually store my photos on a network drive connected thru esata and this is probably the slowest link in my workflow but doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. An SSD may add some speed but I think more ram will be more of a significant change.

[Adam]

I just picked up a new Sony Vaio S-series 15-inch laptop. It's much more compact than my old 16.4-inch F series (which shit the bed), and it's got the following specs:

-Core i7 2.1Ghz quad-core w/HT
-8GB 1333mhz RAM
-Nvidea GT 640M LE

It works great, even for opening numerous 645D RAW files at a time! With a 64-bit OS, I've found that having 6Gb or more of ram is adequate, while having a decent graphics card is important if you have photoshop CS5 or newer.

Adam
PentaxForums.com Webmaster (Site Usage Guide | Site Help | My Photography)



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[reeftool]

High end video cards or chips aren't usually needed if your graphics are limited to photography. The newest onboard graphics are pretty good but if you also play games, that changes things. What is essential is memory and on a computer you would buy today, 8GB minimum. Also, the biggest hard drive available. File sizes are getting bigger with every new sensor and if you shoot video you will need even more hard drive space. I would consider a 1 TB HD a minimum on a purchase today and get an even larger external one for backup. A good monitor is the biggest expense. Most laptops suck in this regard.

[Schmidlapper]

High end video cards or chips aren't usually needed if your graphics are limited to photography.

In general that is normally true, unless the software you are using is designed to utilize your GPU for enhanced processing. Many NIK plug-ins are now able to utilize the GPU for faster processing. In that same scenario, more graphic memory is also desired. Other than that exception, you are quite correct about general photo display not needing high end graphics cards.

[kwetiaw]

I just purchased a computer with a quad-core AMD processor with built in graphics, similar specs to yours, 64bit OS and 10gb of ram. The speed of loading photos and responsiveness of sliders in Lightroom is lightning fast, compared to my old duo-core 32 bit OS and maxed 4gb of ram(most that 32 bit OS systems can use). I have cut down on my post processing time by at least half (subjective guess). If you have a 64 bit OS, More ram is definitely the way to go, at least 16gb, more so than a new video card as the built in graphics are generally quite adequate for photo-editing. If you also want to edit video or game, then go ahead and replace the graphics for the improvement to frames-per-second they provide. Buy the fastest ram you can install in your system (check your motherboard specs, no sense in wasting money on speed you can't use) , buy 16gb of quality, name brand ram and replace all the ram you have as matched ram will generally work a whole lot better than unmatched ram. I actually store my photos on a network drive connected thru esata and this is probably the slowest link in my workflow but doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. An SSD may add some speed but I think more ram will be more of a significant change.

I think I agree, I dont use the PC for gaming only for photo editing. SSD and more RAM is my priority, I never dealt with SSD before but from what I heard it's lightning fast

[kwetiaw]

My Specs from the 'puter I built a few years ago now... before photography was a priority. I am due for an update but that means Mother Board RAM SSD and CPU which costs money lol
Plus I am waiting for DDR4 RAM to get into the system, no point buying DDR3 motherboard and CPU at this point as it leaves no upgrade path really.

Processor: Intel Q9450 2.66Ghz Quad Core, If I am doing something demanding I'll overclock to 2.9-3.2GHz
Ram: 4Gb DDR2 800Mhz
Motherboard: Asus P5Q Premium
HDD: Gskill 64GB SSD, Segate 1.5TB in the Box plus about 5TB of drives I swap through a dock.
Case: Antec 900
Graphics: ATI Radeon 5870 1Gb
PSU: 800W Thermaltake
OS: Windows 7 ultimate N

As for the sluggishness, when your run programs that are intense such as PS and LR there are a number of choke points. In no particular order and divided into upgrade options or maintenance/Tweaking options:

Upgrades:

• your HDD is probably one. I would look at getting an SSD to run your PS and LR from separate to the operating system, they have next to zero latency and significantly faster read/write speeds. if you wish to stick with this you can improve it's performance... See Maintenance.
• RAM is another. I only have 4GB and will occasionally max it out when doing some stacking with LR and PS open + I use Firefox which is a little more demanding than chrome on the Ram side of things. 16GB should last a while, and is one of the best bang for buck performance upgrades.
• Graphics. This is important if you are running a monitor with large colour gamut as some cards don't produce enough bit depth in the colours for decent monitors. the GB's are not a huge thing at this point nearly all cards come with at least 1gb which is plenty.
• CPU should be ok if you do your maintenance.... see maintenance.
• PSU.... or Power supply unit, if your have gone along and made updates, GPU especially, you might find it sucks more juice than your current one can supply and make for some stability issues.

Maintenance/tweaking:

• if you have a disk drive (not solid state) then regular defrag is essential to performance. Defragging SSD will shorten their life.
• remove the junk programs, it will reduce the number of processes running in the background.... I like CCleaner (aka Crap cleaner). It allows you to do most important stuff from the one place. Also let you scan the registry and clean up all the traces left by programs when you uninstall them (it's free).
• you can go down the line of Overclocking. CPU RAM, motherboard GPU but you will need to know what your doing otherwise you can fry stuff. I think this is unnecessary for you.
• Clean inside the box to keep things in there cool and prolong their life . A can of compressed inert gas (not air) will do. compressed air has moisture. Moisture + computer innerds = BAD.
• Back up everything to external drive
• Back up everything to external drive
• Back up everything to external drive or cloud... just encase you forget!

There is probably a whole bunch of things I missed by this is just a start.. and it's 1:45am so I am probably a zombie by this stage... no quite sure though.

So you are suggesting that install lightroom/ps in the SSD and do the initial import to SSD then normal HDD as a backup/storage?

[Chaos_Realm]

So you are suggesting that install lightroom/ps in the SSD and do the initial import to SSD then normal HDD as a backup/storage?

That is personally how I would do it. SSD's have near zero latency, and have data transfer speeds well beyond that of HDD, They draw less power, they are less susceptible to shock damage due to no moving parts... Basically better in every way except this comes at a cost. So it would cost you a fortune to have similar capacity in SSD.

I to get the most performance from your hard drives whilst staying within reasonable $$ limits, have a smaller capacity SSD - 128GB/256GB - drive for working files and LR/PS, then use the standard HDD as a cheaper method of backing up the bulk of your images.

If money were no object, I would say get a couple Revodrives (a SSD that connects to PCIe to take advantage of huge bandwidth over SATA) and set them up in a raid configuration. Then have a Mirrored remote drive for backups but really it is completely unnecessary to go to these lengths given the marginal improvements you get per $.

[Miguel]

SSDs require some research as some brands have older internal configurations and settings that don't maximize performance. Samsung 128G 830 worked for me.

Only your OS & key apps like Photoshop & Lightroom should go on the SSD. While the LR catalog should as well, images should not. There are only so many read/writes an SSD will do, plus you will run out of space sooner.

With this setup I've been very happy with the quickness of LR. But quite honestly I don't know how much of that to attribute to the SSD or just to my custom-built Hackintosh have the latest Sandy Bridge CPU & 16GB RAM.

If you are not doing video production or 3D modeling a powerful graphics card won't add much. Maybe future versions of software will exploit those capabilities within a couple of years. Until then a more modest $75 card will suffice.

M

[Class A]

I am looking to add more RAM to 16GB and 1GB or 2GB PCIe Video Card. I primarily uses Adobe Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS4, when both programs are running it uses up to 2GB RAM + other programs such as Chrome browsers, leaving around 1GB or less free.

The main reason for sluggishness is Lightroom (the subpar programming).

Lightroom will not benefit from a better graphics card, but PS CS4 will.
Both, but mostly Lightroom, will benefit from more RAM. Even if you don't come close to using your 4GB, Lightroom will use a different, faster caching strategy with more RAM.

It isn't that important where Lightroom and PS are installed. In particular LR is not that huge and you only pay a penalty at startup and when you use a module first. I would consider putting the catalogs (at least the ones you are currently working with) and ACR cache to the fastest disc you have.

There is an Adobe article on how to best configure your system to support LR, but frankly, you are either lucky and LR runs decently, or you suffer from Adobe programmers knowing little about synchronization, threading, etc., and will experience sluggish performance. No system tweak mentioned in the Adobe source will make a significant difference. Some people find disabling hyper-threading or restricting LR to just one core to speed up LR.

[kwetiaw]

SSDs require some research as some brands have older internal configurations and settings that don't maximize performance. Samsung 128G 830 worked for me.

Only your OS & key apps like Photoshop & Lightroom should go on the SSD. While the LR catalog should as well, images should not. There are only so many read/writes an SSD will do, plus you will run out of space sooner.

With this setup I've been very happy with the quickness of LR. But quite honestly I don't know how much of that to attribute to the SSD or just to my custom-built Hackintosh have the latest Sandy Bridge CPU & 16GB RAM.

If you are not doing video production or 3D modeling a powerful graphics card won't add much. Maybe future versions of software will exploit those capabilities within a couple of years. Until then a more modest $75 card will suffice.

M

I agree with you with the SSD, there are so many options out there at the moment. I think this changes my priority list.
1. SSD
2. RAM
3. GPU