Building/upgrading my PC for Lightroom

[thesn00ze]

Hey guys,

I spent a lot of time travelling so I was mainly using my laptop HP Spectre 13 for photo editing but I'm taking a break from travelling and I'm thinking about building a new PC (or upgrading my current one) mainly for Lightroom. My current rig hasn't been upgraded in years and I built it almost 10 years ago.

MB: Asus P5Q Pro

CPU: Intel E8400 3GHz (clocked at 3.4)

GPU: Radeon HD7700 1GB

RAM: 8GB DDR2

HDD: Samsung SSD Evo 860, 250GB + 3TB Sata HDDs

What I'm thinking is getting just new MB (MSI Z370), CPU (i5-8400), and RAM (not sure).

I'm on a tight budget (maybe getting only 8GB mem for now). Do you have any other suggestions? Is it even worth it?

 

[profoundnoah]

Definitely worth a processor upgrade. The 6 Cores will be a massive step up, even if the 8400 runs at a slightly lower base clock. If this isn't urgent, you could wait a few months and save up enough for an i7 8700 (locked) and 16 GB.

 

[cryoburner]

The 6 Cores will be a massive step up, even if the 8400 runs at a slightly lower base clock.

The clocks aren't directly comparable, since IPC (instructions per clock) have increased quite a bit since the Core 2 Duo debuted ten years ago. And of course, as soon as the processor does anything demanding, it instantly switches to its boost clocks, which for the i5-8400 range from 3.8 to 4.0 GHz, depending on the number of active cores. Base clocks don't really matter much. Between the improved IPC and the higher boost frequencies, an i5-8400 should be more than twice as fast even at single-threaded tasks, and much faster still at more heavily-threaded workloads...

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-8400-vs-Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400/3939vs2720

I do find it kind of amusing that you are moving from an E8400 to an i5-8400 though. : D

If you don't want to spend too much on the upgrade, you could probably go with a somewhat lower-end motherboard. The main features of the Z370 chipset are overclocking and multi-GPU setups, which it seems like you probably won't be making use of anyway.

 

[profoundnoah]

I'm well aware of that fact, but thanks for clarifying it for the OP.

 

[thesn00ze]

Thanks cryoburner for clarifying the difference between the two mentioned CPUs. I don't really need all the goodies from Z370 chipset, that's a good point and might save me some money.

I didn't even notice the E8400/i5-8400, that's funny.