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!

 

[Doyle Thomas]

1~ 16GB is enough more memory wont help but buying a solid state drive and assigning it as your scratch disk will help some
2~ faster video again will help some look for a "gaming card"
3~ here is the best bang but expensive and unless you are comfortable inside the computer not recommended

the best thing may be to just live with it until you are ready for a new computer and go to a custom build shop for advice. That's what I did, I do a lot of
high resolution scanning with base file sizes as large as 250~700Mb, when I start adding layers they can reach 4Gb pretty fast and I have to save in large
file format. Some actions are still "pack a lunch" but I can deal with it.

I have built my own computers in the past but had issues like the cd drive not being seen by the mother board. Contact the drive company and they say
its a mother board problem they are supposed to fix it. Contact the mother board company and they say its a drive problem they are supposed to fix it.

 

[tkamiya]

What you need to do to speed up your PC really depends on what part of your PC is "resource bound." In other words, out of all components, what is tailing all others in terms of performance.

It could be your CPU, memory, video card, or disk.

Windows OS has "task manager" and in it, a "performance" tab that will show you what is maxing out.

I suspect 16GB is enough for what you are doing. CPU isn't usually the slowest part. I'd bet it's your disk. Here, going from regular hard disk to solid state disk will give you several fold performance boost. But that's all guessing. Performance monitor will tell you what is lacking.

I don't use Lightroom but I use PhotoShop CC. I have dual Xeon CPU with total of 12 cores and 40GB of memory. Unfortunately, Photoshop does not use all of the CPU resources. Although I have a lot in terms of processing power, I find typically few cores maxes out while others are just idling. Memory usage never goes over about 12Gig or so.

Here, I could go to faster clock rate rather than more cores, but that's a lot of money for upgrade. Until Photoshop programming improves to better use resources, nothing else I do will improve my result. All this became obvious watching the performance monitor.

 

[OzJohn]

Having a dedicated video card with its own memory versus on-board video makes a significant difference to PS processing but in my experience upgrading the video card you already have does not make much difference at all. Agree with other posters that 16 gig RAM is all you need but adding a SSD as the scratch disk will impress you. OzJohn

 

[Doyle Thomas]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0..._t=101&pf_rd_p=2124126882&pf_rd_i=11821938011

 

[haring]

Windows OS has "task manager" and in it, a "performance" tab that will show you what is maxing out.

Thanks so much! Let me check it right now!

 

[andrewf]

Thanks so much! Let me check it right now!

Resmon.exe is a good way to find bottlenecks in windows. I use it all the time when troubleshooting PCs for end users. You're likely to have a bottle neck in either your CPU or Disk Input/Output.

There are several tabs and interpreting it can be confusing but the main think you want to look for is your disk queue length. If this number is over 1.0 for any extended period, you will be noticing poor performance. That means that there are more requests of the disk subsystem than can be performed, hence the queue is longer. If you're running a traditional mechanical disk, then stuff like page file IO, scratch disk IO and stuff like that can be a cause. Or sometimes windows thinks it's a good idea to do some indexing while you're trying to work. These things are all common causes of poor performance. Getting a good SSD will help here. Don't cheap out. My GF did that and her SSD is OK, but doesn't have enough IOPS to really crank. What I do is try and have my work in progress photographs on an SSD while I'm working on them. That really helps. Then when I'm done editing and stuff I move them to slower disk for long term storage.

The other thing to look at is CPU usage. Resmon will let you filter CPU usage by process so you can get a good view of what is using the most cycles.

Your 3770K processor is the same as mine and us unlocked, meaning it can be overclocked. I've overclocked mine to 4.1ghz. I did have it higher but my PC is upstairs which gets hot in summer and it didn't like that much. Your motherboard needs to support overclocking and if you aren't confident, I probably wouldn't recommend it. But overclocking (gaining more CPU cycles) can give you a nice little bump in performance.

You'll likely get a lot of different advice on this topic and sometimes it turns in to a bit of a nerd fight but just stick to the basics and you'll soon figure out what your issues are. I'

 

[RalphLambrecht]

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!

get an iMac with a solid state drive and lots of memory

 

[mdarnton]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0..._t=101&pf_rd_p=2124126882&pf_rd_i=11821938011

This.
And SSDs have gotten really cheap, so it's not a big deal like it used to be.

 

[seanECfreeman]

I double that, An SSD drive will give you the best speed for your buck no matter whats wrong with your pc, opening light room will be much quicker so will your boot up time. if money is a problem buy a small 128gb one ''about 50 euro'', instal your operating system, programs, and import images for immediate use on it, then export onto an external drive. I wouldn't bother with ram, 16gb is plenty, ''unless you do a lot of heavy video work'' its hard to us up 16gb of memory photo editing,

 

[seanECfreeman]

Jugging by your specs your pc should not be that slow, When did you last reinstall windows? I'm on mac now but in my windows days i did a clean install every month or 2