CPU upgrade for LR and Photoshop

mghell34

Reputable
Aug 20, 2015
10
0
4,510
Hey there , Seems like I need to upgrade my CPU for my uses.
as for now I currently have the following build:

I5-4690
Gigabyte H97-HD3 MB .
16 Gigs of RAM [ 1600 CL 9 - 4x4 ]
Gigabyte GTX 1060 6GB OC

I noticed that my CPU load goes up to 90% and even higher when I start working on LR and PS.

The issue is most of the times I'm uploading my whole RAW directory and sorting out and filtering images out using LR .

I am giving the Pc time to load the whole library and start working after.
it seems that it takes lot of time for it to load every image when I browse through them , and it takes between 5 to 15 seconds to load the image with the edits on it [ if i have edited it before ofc ].
when i zoom in it takes about 5-10 seconds for every image to stop being pixelated...
and in PS i mostly feeling it slow with all the rendering filters and effects.

anyway , I've been looking through what I could buy and it seems like the best option I have is the I7-4790 [ I'm not into overclocking so I dont really want the K , and I think my MB doesn't support OC anyways ].
The issue is that it seems like the difference between the two is not that big ,
the biggest difference is the threads the both have , which should make my work easier and faster but I'm not sure if its worth the money [ its costs around 400 USD where I live ] .

the second option for me is to wait a little bit more and switch the trio [ CPU, MB and RAM ] which costs way more and I will have to save money for it for a while... not sure which is the correct option for me.

and one more little question is - my cache files of LR are sitting on my HDD since my SSD doesnt have enough free space... will I see a big difference if I get an SSD for my cache files?
 
If the files you're working on and your cache are on the slower hdd that could have a lot to do with it. A 4790 has hyper threading but not much additional clock speed. The 4790k does have a bit higher clock speed out of the box whether it's oc'd or not.

Lightroom can make some use of additional cores/threads but most of it doesn't realize much improvement beyond 4 cores.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Lightroom-CC-6-Multi-Core-Performance-649/

Photoshop is the same way, very few things make use of more than 2-4 cores.

Image loading, library loading etc sounds like storage speed issues. Are you using the latest ps cc2017 with win10 by chance?
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2232719

This isn't the first time adobe's suffered performance issues, they keep releasing updates but system slowdowns go back several versions which are supposed to be 'fixed' with updates/patches. It's not always as simple as throwing hardware at it when it could be a software issue.
 

mghell34

Reputable
Aug 20, 2015
10
0
4,510

well the photoshop as I said i suffer from the slow only on rendering effects so it's not much of an issue.
biggest problem is the LR .
may my cpu load go so high because of the HDD ?
so I should try and get an SSD just for all the cache files and for saving the files I work on there untill I finish?
[ 1 TB ssd is way out of my payroll haha, but I think I can get myself 250-480 GB and just move the files to an HDD when I'm done with editing ].
and for my general HDD should i get one of the Hybrid ones?

guess imma start with the storage issues indeed , since I need to get another SSD and HDD anyway [ both are at 75% used capacity so... ]
thanks!

and thanks for the benchmarks. It really seems like im gonna postpone with the cpu upgrade