Hi Boris,
Boris Liberman wrote:
The time to upgrade my home PC has come. My main workflow revolves
around LightRoom 2.1 and I intend to keep using LR in the future.
The dilemma is which processor to buy - dual core or quad core. My
brother (who happens to be top grade sys admin) suggests that I buy dual
core processor because of its low heat generation and low power
consumption. He suggests that dual core is optimal balance. However he
admits to have no experience with applications such as LR.
Thence the question. Is there any of you who was using dual core and
upgraded to quad core and noticed significant LR performance
improvements? In general, what do you suggest - dual core or quad core?
The motherboard that I am going to buy will support both dual and quad
core so that I could theoretically upgrade in the future should I
decided that dual core is not strong enough. But I'd rather optimize
this criterion up front.
My experience has been that more and faster memory typically make a
bigger difference than the processor, and I'd guess that LR is no
different, due in part to the large "undo" cache it needs, like any
photo editor. That said, the only place you're likely to see any
difference at all between a dual core and a quad core in LR is when
you're applying filters/manipulations to an image. It's not going to
help with compress/decompress, because those are limited by the disk
bandwidth much more than processor or memory bandwidth.
If it were my computer, for these sorts of tasks, I'd start by getting
4GB or more of the fastest memory that my motherboard will support.
Then I'd consider increasing the disk bandwidth with either faster
drives or RAID or both. Only then would I consider dropping significant
cash on a new processor.
Now if I was running big simulations or "SETI at Home" or "Folding at
Home" or ray tracing or something, then I'd go for processor. But most
people are limited far more by the memory and disk than the CPU.
--
Thanks,
DougF (KG4LMZ)
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