Lightroom Beast!

Build Suggestions for a Lightroom 4 & PhotoShop CS6 Machine.

Hi all,

I'm looking to build a machine specifically for Lightroom 4, I don't care about anything else really, apart from a little bit of PhotoShop CS6. I just need the Lightroom to FLY! What I have now is is stupid slow and is as follows:

Mac Pro early 2008

Processor: 2 x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series ("Harpertown")
Memory: 18 GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB
APPLE RAID Card Revision: 312E3030 (Really dated)
System Hard Drives: SSD OCZ Vertex 4 256GB
Remaining Hard Drives: 3x 1TB 7200rpm SAMSUNG HD103UJ, which are Hardware RAID 0

If I upgraded to a newer Mac Pro, sure I would be getting a faster machine but I don't think it would be significantly faster from what I've read, they are still very dated and I believe I also read somewhere that in certain applications, they were slower than the 2010 models, whatever. In addition i.e. no Thunderbolt, no USB 3 3GB/s system speed.

I don't want to wait until late 2013, which is the predicted time Apple said they were going to update the "New" Mac Pro, which is pretty much the same as the old Mac Pro. Apple needs to get with the program and start catering for the Pro market again.

I found this very interesting: http://www.macworld.com/article/1167386/meet_the_new_mac_pro_about_the_same_as_the_old_mac_pro.html

I need something that is as quick as it can get for Lightroom!

Thank you in advance.

Well as old as your machine is, it's not horrible in terms of speed. It sits in that middle ground where it isn't awesome (by today's standards), but it doesn't suck outright, either.

If you want to upgrade to something SIGNIFICANTLY better, though, you'll probably want to consider the 2011 chipset. Those builds don't come without their caveats, though. You can build a machine with Ivy Bridge that is 50% better than what you've got right now if you really push the envelope, but I don't think you'll get the kind of performance increase you expect without looking at some really high end gear. But if you're considering dropping enough money for a new Mac Pro then the high end gear is certainly within your budget. It just involves some careful planning and some trade-offs like losing Speed Step and sleep/wake capabilities. If you're comfortable with that, check out this link:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/100-building-customac-buyer-s-guide-2012.html

Scroll down the the area labeled "Socket 2011 CustoMac Pro Build". If stability and features are more important than raw speed, check out "Ivy Bridge CustoMac Pro Build".

i too am very interested in a lightroom machine. i don't understand enough about the benchmarking scores to know how they translate into real world use editing 1,000+ 22mp raw files in a stretch. my computer is not as fast as yours (2.8 octocore, but also early 2008) and i only have 7200rpm drives and i also only have 10 gigs of ram, but it benchmarks at 11,000 in 64-bit mode.

i am very interested to know more about how the video card affects LR performance. like you i also have the 8800GT. if i run my system at a smaller resolution, LR is a lot faster. but if I take advantage of all 30", it gets twitchy.

what interests me about a new machine is way faster and way cheaper memory, way faster SSD drives that I will install, and a much more powerful processor. but that machine will benchmark at 14,000... only a 30% improvement, which isn't that much. but that's the geekbench score, and doesn't say anything about "will lightroom operate sufficiently fast at 30" while crunching 22 megapixel images."

i don't care so much about import or export speed. the jobs are so big i have to walk away anyway. i do care a lot about usability, though. i don't want to sit and wait for the effects of my brushes to show up, or wait for an image to render despite already being a 1:1 preview, etc.

I've never had to wait for brush effects like that in Lightroom, and the laptop I typically use isn't as fast as your Mac Pro. Granted, it's not on a 30" screen... When was the last time you optimized your catalog?

i actually use a fresh catalog for each job. i really think the screen size has a lot to do with it though. are you using LR4? LR3 was way faster but I like process 2012 more.

I'm actually using LR3. My copy of LR4 should arrive this week. I'm looking forward to the built-in geotagging features, but I'm bummed to hear your issues with speed.

The video card you're using sounds pretty weak. Perhaps even a modest upgrade could see some benefit. It's my understanding that LR doesn't care much about video cards at all, but if your video card is old enough, it may not easily handle the screen rendering, anyway. Which version of OS X are you using? And are you sure you're running LR in 64 bit mode?

yeah I'm in 64 bit mode on mountain lion. it's funny because the 8800GT was the premium BTO video card offered at the time, but it's only got 512mb on board. LR4 speed issues are well documented -- there are a ton of people complaining about it over on the adobe forums, and some are stuck with it because it's the only option to edit RAW files from the newer cameras... or people just like the new process version a lot more (i certainly do... i think the shadow/highlight recovery works a lot better, and the clarity slider is so much better it's almost completely new). i just hate to invest more money on an aging machine because the RAM it takes is slow and the compatible video cards for it are spendy. but please post back in one of these threads when you get LR4 rolling, i'm super interested to hear your thoughts on how it runs on your hack when compared to LR3.

Sure thing! You've got me curious now, too. I don't have a huge catalog, but it's probably 120GB or so. I'm running a Core i7 3770K so it's at the top of the range for 1155 chipsets, but it'll get smoked by anything running a 2011 chipset. We'll see how it fares.

How much faster is the 2011 than 1155? I just ordered the i7 3770K, GA-Z77X-UP5-TH and 16GB RAM. Lightroom is the main thing i would be using it for. I now have a late 2007 MBP with 4GB ram and 2,2 core duo.

Click to expand...

Upgrading from your current setup to the Core i7 3770K is going to feel like lightning. The processors with 2011 chipsets are certainly faster, but they're (literally) exponentially more expensive, too. I really only recommend them if you can't sacrifice any compromise whatsoever and you find that your already-decent setup isn't cutting the mustard. However, the Core i7 3770K will already be multiple times faster than your 2007 MBP.

I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom extensively. Two of best places to get benchmark information for photography on Mac OS X including LR are:

http://macperformanceguide.com

and

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/blog/will-an-ssd-improve-adobe-lightroom-performance/

Here are the steps in order from most effective to least effective for speeding up LR:

1. A fast CPU. Lightroom is compute-bound for importing, browsing, editing and exporting. Hyperthreading seems to help. The Intel Core i7-3770K is the best LGA 1155 socket choice. LGA 2011 socket CPUs and multiple CPUs can be even faster.
2. More RAM. Lightroom will use the extra RAM to reduce recalculation.
3. Fast disk storage for the system and Lightroom app, catalog and cache. This is a small improvement compared to CPU and RAM. SSD or RAID or RAID of SSDs for these will make a small increase in performance.
4. Fast Disk storage for the image files. Even less difference than above, except that backups can be much faster.
5. Graphics cards have little or no effect on performance. Lightroom does not currently use the computing cores on graphics cards, and does not draw many triangles on the screen. This may change for future versions. I routinely use integrated graphics only with no noticeable difference in performance.

Some tips for LR performance:

http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/03/five_ways_to_speed_up_lightroo.html

Note some sites recommend minimum preview size, etc. to increase performance. This reduces import time, but makes LR much slower to use!