I've got a single Samsung 840 Pro and two WD Blacks (750GB) in RAID on a P55 board running an overclocked i5 750 (3.9Ghz). I'm wondering how much of an improvement an upgrade to a new Z97 system will make in photo tasks. I run a lot of heavy Lightroom work and Photoshop, sometimes stitching time series of 900 photos, @ 50mb each, or doing image stacking in Photoshop. This is pretty CPU intensive and I would guess that the upgrade might help a bit here. It is clear to me it wont' make any difference in games (e.g., http://techbuyersguru.com/i5CPUshootout2.php). But I'm wondering if it might make a difference on the SATA bus. My guess would be not much. [But I'm also interested in upgrading to USB 3.0 (which my add in card never works properly with Windows 8) and the increased processing efficiency of the newer architecture]. I'm considering an i5-4690K. I may also just skip the upgrade and juice up my RAM (I only have 8GB which I hit the limit on with some of these tasks). I'd like your thoughts on these issues. Thank you.
Edited to add: I keep my Lightroom catalog and previous on the SSD which is also my Photoshop scratch disk.
Edited to add: I keep my Lightroom catalog and previous on the SSD which is also my Photoshop scratch disk.