Speed up PC for photo editing? What to upgrade?

[haring]

I would love to make my pc faster for photo and video editing. Adobe is trying to help us with some ionstructions on their website but it is not clear how much processing power I gain via replacing one or two components of my desktop. I have read tons of threads on the issue however but I don't seem to find the right way to do it... I would like Lightroom to respond faster when I switch between two images. I would love Portraiture to finish processing the photo I am working on faster in Photoshop, etc My PC: Windows 7, CPU: i7 3770K, Memory 16GB

My questions:
- How much speed do I gain by upgrading the memory to 32GB?
- Would an expensive video card help? Which one?
- Should I upgrade my CPU? Which one do you recommend? Have you done these modifications before?

What is your experience? Which upgrade yielded the best results? Thanks so much!

 

[carl-b]

I think one of the biggest things you can do, if you haven't already? Is to have 2 ssd's installed. One for the OS and programs. 2nd one for a scratch disk/ LR catalogue storage. That will improve things quite a bit.

Graphics card. Adobe don't recommend expensive cards, depending on your version? Cuda cores will help a lot. More the merrier. Check out the Nvidia GTX cards.

RAM. When PS/LR is open and running, use the resource monitor to see how RAM is being used. If it is about 12gb or less, you might not notice much improvement. However if you can afford it, extra is always useful.

As to the processor, i think to get anything better will require a new motherboard/ system build.

 

[GlenC]

If you install the extra RAM you can configure it as a ram disk. It will look like another hard drive in your system but will consist of ram memory. It's temporary (good until you reboot) but works great for Bridge and Lightroom Cache's.
It's faster than hard drives or ssd. Use a program to configure the ram to look/act like a drive, I'm using one by SoftPerfect RAM Disk.

You won't have a ton of ram to dedicate to the ram disk (say 16gb) so you will occasionally need to check on how much is still available as you edit your files in Lightroom. I don't reboot my system very often so I use the "Purge Cache" button in Lightroom or Bridge and start over but by then I have finished editing those files many days ago so it works for me.

Configure Lightroom under Preferences/File Handling, about 2/3's down, Camera Raw Cache settings.
Also, Photoshop and other programs can use it, just configure their temp/scratch storage drives to be the Ram disk drive.


I ran CrystalDiskMark on both my SSD (Samsung 840 PRO Series) (drive c) and my Ram Disk (drive z) and here is a screenshot of the results:




Glen

 

[haring]

If you install the extra RAM you can configure it as a ram disk. It will look like another hard drive in your system but will consist of ram memory. It's temporary (good until you reboot) but works great for Bridge and Lightroom Cache's.
It's faster than hard drives or ssd. Use a program to configure the ram to look/act like a drive, I'm using one by SoftPerfect RAM Disk.

You won't have a ton of ram to dedicate to the ram disk (say 16gb) so you will occasionally need to check on how much is still available as you edit your files in Lightroom. I don't reboot my system very often so I use the "Purge Cache" button in Lightroom or Bridge and start over but by then I have finished editing those files many days ago so it works for me.

Configure Lightroom under Preferences/File Handling, about 2/3's down, Camera Raw Cache settings.
Also, Photoshop and other programs can use it, just configure their temp/scratch storage drives to be the Ram disk drive.


I ran CrystalDiskMark on both my SSD (Samsung 840 PRO Series) (drive c) and my Ram Disk (drive z) and here is a screenshot of the results:

View attachment 93462


Glen

Thanks so much! Do you fell the difference when you are editing? Was it worth it? Thanks!

 

[danielmoore]

Late response, sorry.

You haven't told us what sort of drive(s) you're presently using. If you're using a standard hard drive then cloning it onto an SSD would be a dramatic improvement.