What Intel platrom to run Lightroom 5?

[KingRoach]

Hi guys. New to the forum and this the first post so if there is anything wrong in posting this kind of question here then please point it out to me.

I've been using my HP Pavilion Dm1-1110sa for about 3 years now as my only laptop, so I also use my Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 5 on it. The little thing sometimes begs for mercy. Importing and exporting those RAWS from my 5DmkII takes a while. Even my internet browsers sometimes get slow.

Just yesterday I damaged the power plug, and while I can fix that for £3, I think it's about time to start looking for a small upgrade.

The last time I compiled my latest tower was near 2005 when I bought the Intel SL8JZ which was a top processor and cost me lots of money (I still remember its index code for God's sake!) It was a Dual Core Prescott at 3.0GHz. Then Core2Duo and real 64-bit technology came out and I stopped reading about it for good.

Nowadays I only see broad family names such as i3, i5 and i7 but they are still clocked differently, some of them are 32-bit and some are 64-bit within the same group.

The question is simple. What do I need to run PS CS5 and LR5 smoothly with no problems while keeping the cost down?

I'm hoping to either get a new laptop, or an all-in-one with a touchscreen running Windows 8 for something around the £250 mark. Second hand. Third hand even.

The reason why I'm not considering Apple is because all of my software and third party applications are Windows compatible. No point in switching.
The only reason why I would consider Apple is whether I get a digital back which only works with Apple.
I saw this Apple MacBook something on eBay on which the owner installed dual boot: Apple and Windows. Is that practical like a full featured installation and would you recommend this kind of set up?

Many thanks for reading.

Best

[Remo Nonaz]

Anything with a 4th generation i5 (i5-4XXX) should be fine. These are fairly expensive CPUs so nothing with one will be truly cheap. If you can find a 2nd or 3rd generation i5 or i7 (iX-2XXX or iX-3XXX) system used, you won't disappointed either. All the new Intel CPUs are powerful. Lr5 does not support any external graphic accelerators, so you do want the fastest CPU you can get to reduce screen delay. (PS does support acceleration.) If you are buying from a dealer, this should not be an issue, but some of the Intel CPUs have on-board graphics, others do not. If you have one of the CPUs without graphics you will have to invest at least $100 in a decent graphics card. The CPU graphics are very adequate for Lr and PS, but make sure the CPU you select has them. Confirm at http://ark.intel.com

Plan on 8GB of memory, which means you will want to run Win 7 or 8 in 64-bit mode. I don't think your comments about the CPUs being 32 or 64 bit is correct. I'm pretty sure they will all run in either mode depending upon the OS loaded.

Plan on a modest (100GB) SSD for your OS and applications. Then add a couple of TB of spinning disk and you'll have a solid system.

[KingRoach]

Many thanks, Remo. That's some very useful and straight to the point feedback.

[hjulenissen]

The last time I compiled my latest tower was near 2005 when I bought the Intel SL8JZ which was a top processor and cost me lots of money (I still remember its index code for God's sake!) It was a Dual Core Prescott at 3.0GHz.

I don't believe in purchasing top processors unless you need that power right now. If you see things in a 8 year perspective (2005->2013->2021), you are probably going to process your images on average more effective by switching every 4 years to moderately good performance costing 1/2 the price, rather than purchasing the very best performance hw every 8 years.

The latest intel cpus (Haswell) got some positive reviews, especially for power efficiency (this also affects acoustic noise). They have significantly improved integrated graphics (it seems that LR does not care that much about choice of GPU), and the new AVX2 instructions offers double the theoretical throughput of vectorized integer code. The latter might plausibly matter for highly optimized image processing, but no guarantees.

I have seen mixed statements about what affects LR performance. I have not seen a systematic test of a suite of LR 5.x operations for variable cpu/gpu/ram/hd/OS, though I would love to see one.

The test below indicates that, for a given Photoshop test, the i7 4770K spends 9.8 seconds, while an Intel Pentium 4 660
3.6GHz spends 68.9 seconds. That is a 7x speedup.
http://anandtech.com/bench/CPU/25

-h