Machine suitable for Photoshop + Lightroom

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nate

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#280985 23-Jan-2021 17:30

Couple years back, bought my Dad an Intel NUC, as he was getting more into photography, and really enjoyed using Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom.

He's now saying his computer feels underpowered, I'm not an expert in what specs are required for running those two programs - does anyone have any suggestions what I should look at upgrading him to?

His current machine has a SSD hard-drive, 16GB memory, running an i5-5300U CPU (2 cores) - I thought this would be enough, but didn't really do too much research into it.

timmmay

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#2640686 23-Jan-2021 19:42

That's about half the speed of the 2600K I used for years doing professional photography, and about 10% the speed of my 5600X. The 5600X does feel a bit faster in bridge, especially batch conversion, but interactive use not a big difference. So the CPU is fairly slow.

16GB RAM is plenty unless he's processing a lot of images or they're very high megapixel (like 30MP+). You might just want a faster CPU. Single core performance is important especially for interactive performance, but the single core performance of that CPU is only a touch less than the 2600K I used for years. Photoshop can take advantage of multiple cores, but more for batch work than in the UI.

So, in short: faster CPU (try for 8 threads) with good single thread performance, 16GB is enough I think but you could go to 32GB if you want to pay for it (doubt it'll help much unless lots of / very large images), decent SSD / nVME disk.

dfnt

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#2640688 23-Jan-2021 19:48

My brother in law got the "Designer" build from computerlounge https://www.computerlounge.co.nz/workstations/contentcreation#493

He uses photoshop and lightroom amongst other things, machine goes well

michaelmurfy

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#2640727 24-Jan-2021 03:17

I often have both Photoshop and Lightroom launched at the same time. With some of the more intensive stuff (editing raw, stitching raw panoramas etc) I note that Lightroom has no issues with using 50gb of ram (these are large images I'm dealing with). If I open these images in Photoshop to edit I can quite easily sit at 40-50gb of ram use with the images I deal with.

Now, I must say my images are large - Stitching a 120 photo raw panorama does take quite a bit of processing power and ram.

Now, with the more regular stuff I often hover between 25-30gb of ram use dealing with raw photos. Having a decent GPU (the more CUDA cores, the better) along with a grunty CPU with plenty of cores (look into the Ryzen stuff) and plenty of ram helps immensely.

I could do my workload on my old workstation which had a 8 core, 16 thread Xeon (can't remember the model off the top of my head) and 32gb of ram but would find that even then I would exhaust the ram and either have Lightroom crash or the whole thing would feel slow.

The specs of my PC are the following:
Ryzen 3800X (8 core, 16 threads) clocked at 4.6GHz per core (overclocked).
64gb of DDR4 3200MHz memory (dual channel configuration).
Nvidia RTX 3700.
Fast NVMe SSD's (one dedicated to a cache drive, the other for the photos I am working with).

Essentially, I've built a high end gaming machine for mostly running Photoshop / Lightroom. Both will use all your CPU cores and whatever RAM it can get it's hands on. You don't have to go as extreme as myself, but as @timmmay says go with a build focusing on CPU (Ryzen has very fast single-core performance) along with memory more than anything. Popping in a second-hand GTX 1060 as an example will help a touch too.

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timmmay

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#2640732 24-Jan-2021 07:02

The resources required really depend on usage and software. What is your Dad doing exactly? What software, and what is slow?

I was a professional photographer processing 2000+ photos a week with an i7 2600K, 16GB RAM, SSD, no graphics card, no performance issues just batching took a bit of time which didn't matter. Stitching and panoramas takes a lot more RAM. High megapixels benefit from more ram due to caching. Lightroom can use a lot of RAM, but doesn't need it as such. Fast video cards are used for a few tasks but I don't think they add all that much.

Any modern processor with 8 threads, 16GB RAM, good SSD will be fine for standard photo processing. Anything else you add resources for.

Batman

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#2640737 24-Jan-2021 08:15

nate:

Couple years back, bought my Dad an Intel NUC, as he was getting more into photography, and really enjoyed using Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom.

He's now saying his computer feels underpowered, I'm not an expert in what specs are required for running those two programs - does anyone have any suggestions what I should look at upgrading him to?

His current machine has a SSD hard-drive, 16GB memory, running an i5-5300U CPU (2 cores) - I thought this would be enough, but didn't really do too much research into it.

3 additional things to your ssd / ram that make them fast in descending order of importance

1. single core cpu performance

2. multicore cpu performance

3. gtx xx70 /above for rendering (making picture appear on the screen - does not affect export speed or other processes that doesn't involve putting the picture on your screen)

i don't know if they're now optimized for amd these things historically run faster on intel

Batman

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#2640738 24-Jan-2021 08:19

5300U is your main problem

also try clearing cache and maxing cache size

gzt

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#2640845 24-Jan-2021 09:39

If it was originally ok - you might buy yourself a little time with an O/S recovery and more memory. Intel 5300U is still a good processor for many things - originally released 2015 tho so even modern celeron mobile can nearly beat it in one or two selected metrics.