lightning fast Lightroom machine

[ben_swinnerton1]

Can someone spec me up a pc that will blitz thru images in Lightroom. I shoot weddings and edit thousands of images at a time so want a

machine that will chew thru imports, previews, adjustments and exports at speed.

 

I'm currently using a MacBook pro 2.4ghz 4 gb ram but it just doesn't cut the mustard.

 

I was considering a Mac Pro but can't justify spending that kind of money.

 

Help?

[sheldonnalos]

<p>Currently, Lightroom runs faster on a 64 bit PC than a Mac since it is coded to more efficiently use a multi-core processor than the Mac version. Here's a prior thread where I posed this question...</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00TJhr</p>

<p>Look at the difference between preview generation on a top of the line Mac Pro vs a moderately fast PC. The PC is over twice as fast at 1/6 of the cost. You could build a much faster PC (i7 quad core) now than what my machine does.</p>

[andylynn]

<p>Actually, a newer Macbook Pro with a Core i7 would be very fast as a Lightroom box. With the Turbo Boost it's going to max out its CPU at about 3GHz in multithreaded operations and about 3.3GHz in single threaded apps. Lightroom isn't set up to take advantage of the large number of cores in a Mac Pro. Aside from that, since there isn't a Mac in the very fast single CPU desktop class, you'd be looking for a Windows desktop with a fast i7.</p>

[andylynn]

<p>Sheldon, so what you're saying is, Ben should actually upgrade to Aperture? :)</p>

<p>But seriously, since Adobe has redone a bunch of the core and the raw importer for Lightroom 3, I wonder at how applicable your info still is - and an uncontrolled test on two computers isn't exactly a scientific survey...</p>

[sheldonnalos]

<p>I'm guessing that Lightroom 3 and CS5 are going to fix a lot of the issues that have existed with inefficiency of use of multi-core CPU's and access to RAM. If that issue is fixed then this whole Mac vs PC efficiency in Lightroom thing goes out the window.</p>

<p>However, I'm sure that my info is pretty valid currently... Yes, my machine is a generation old for PC's (Q9550 vs i7) but the Mac Pro that was the basis for comparison by Lloyd Chambers is a current generation, dual CPU, 8 core Nehalem 2.93GHz Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM. You can't buy a better one right now. I don't know of anyone more methodical and thorough than Lloyd when it comes to testing and analyzing Mac performance on Photoshop/Lightroom. His Mac takes 10 minutes to generate 128 1:1 previews from a 1Ds III. Mine takes half that, and I can attest to that through experience of shooting/editing tens of thousands of 1Ds III images in Lightroom.</p>

<p>I hope that the new versions of LR and CS5 get rid of this inefficiency, but the underlying cost vs performance question is still out there.</p>

[sheldonnalos]

<p>To get back to Ben's request that someone spec him up a fast box for LR... Here's what I would buy if I were doing it all right now. Build your own, shop at Newegg.com.</p>

<p>Antec 900 case - ugly, but lots of room and great airflow for cool operation.<br /> Any reasonably sized power supply<br /> i7 930 CPU w/ aftermarket air cooling fan (overclock to 3.6 or 3.7Ghz)<br /> ASUS P6X578D Premium motherboard<br /> 12GB RAM<br /> Intel X-25M 80GB SSD for boot drive/OS/programs<br /> Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black drives (as many as needed for storage, RAID 0 a couple if you want fast scratch for photoshop)<br /> Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5770 1 GB Video Card (times two for dual screens)<br /> Dual monitors of your preference... a 24" plus a 22 or 20" makes a nice combo. (You really should go dual screen with LR)</p>

<p>Not super cheap, but would be a killer system to work on and smoking fast.</p>

<p> </p>

[andylynn]

<p>Did your test machine have raid when you did that comparison?</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>Without a budget, I can't suggest much. A hint or two if you're buying pre-made from Dell or HP or if you buying a cart of parts from newegg, would be helpful too.</p>

[mark_sirota1]

<p>It's mostly about disk I/O.</p>

<p>Think about generating previews, for instance. LR has to read from the original files, write some data to the ACR cache, write data to the Previews database, and write some information to the catalog. If you can separate all that activity so there's no contention between them, and maximize the performance of each storage component, you can minimize the time to generate previews.</p>

<p>Put each of these things (and the operating system) on separate spindles. Use fast disks or super-fast SSDs where appropriate. Use fast hardware RAID controllers configured for performance. Add a ton of RAM and put the ACR cache on a RAMdisk. (And don't forget backups. The fastest storage configurations may not be the most reliable!)</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>I wouldn't go ssd, yet. But the new wd velociraptors are out and they are awesome<br>

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=822</p>

[sheldonnalos]

<p>I believe that test was before I went RAID 0. I think I had my LR catalog on one drive (WD 640GB) and the OS/program/test files on another drive (150GB Velociraptor).</p>

<p>Mark - that's just not true for Lightroom. It has almost nothing to do with disk I/O when it comes to rendering previews. The amount of data that is being moved around just doesn't even come close to taxing the SATA interface or hard drive throughput. Lloyd Chambers has some extensive tests showing that you don't see any improvement by going to a faster drive such as an SSD or a RAID 0 array. RAM isn't maxed out either, my computer only uses half of my 8GB of RAM when rendering previews.The only time that disk I/O becomes an issue is when exporting really big files such as full resolution TIF files to disk. Then LR can benefit from a faster disk to improve write performance since the data throughput is pretty high. Otherwise, it's almost exclusively a CPU activity.</p>

<p>Photoshop scratch disk is a totally different story, where I/O bandwidth is very important.</p>

[martin_howard1]

<p>Velociraptors are a waste of money, even the new ones.<br>

2 x 1GB Samsung Spinpoint F3's or WD Caviar Blacks Short Stroked to 500GB in a RAID 0 array offer similar performance for less money, noise and heat.<br>

SSD's are a worthwhile investment as they speed up the general operation of a PC, I recently installed Win7 Pro onto a Intel X25-M 80GB SSD; booting is super quick and apps open more or less instantly. With most SSD's now offering TRIM support any fears over the lifespan of SSDs can be laid to rest.<br>

One caveat to SSDs is to make sure the motherboard is using an Intel matrix storage controller such as the ICH10R - X58 Socket 1366 i7 boards will have this, so it's a sort of moot point for a new i7 build anyway.</p>

 

[mariosforsos]

<p>A lot of valid points - I'm only going to correct one little misconception: LR on the Mac can run either in 32 or 64bit mode - and THAT makes a ton of difference, especially in newer machines. It can access more memory (meaning it can render previews much, much faster) and it can buffer instructions and catalogue information much quicker.</p>

<p>Importing also has to do with HOW you import. If you're using a USB reader you'll be slower than if you are using a USB 2.0 and even slower than if you were using a Firewire reader. Also, if you choose to render full 1:1 previews right at import, that would also delay the import process. Finally, if you're importing RAW files (whether converting to DNG or not during import) that would also make importing slower. You could potentially speed things up a bit by importing with minimal previews and then only have LR render full 1:1 previews on editing...;-)</p>

<p>Personally, I have over 17k images in my library and it opens almost instantly (with 1:1 previews) on my brand new i5 27" iMac with 16GB RAM (from a 7200rpm external drive). Seriously, I don't think you need to fork out enormous amounts of money to get the performance you need...</p>

<p>I'm not going to go into the Mac vs PC debate - just use what your budget, experience and workflow points you to...;-)</p>

[ben_swinnerton1]

<p>Marios, how do you change between 32 or 64bit in LR.<br>

Also, how do you find the glossy screen on the iMac. Does it give your images an exact colour match when you print them, assuming you've calibrated your monitor. I do like the new iMac and its specs, but I'm just not sure about the screen.</p>

 

[stevenseelig]

<p>Not sure what your definition of lightning speed is but on an old Alu iMac (10.6.3) 2.8 Ghz C2D with 4 GB of RAM using Aperture 3.0.2, I can review, adjust, touch up (including modest blemish removal), export and upload the results of a 1000-1500 shoot in less than 48 hours. Remove my review and touching up, could do it in less than 8 hours. I find that I am considerably slower than my computer. Probably could handle twice as many images in another 12 hours or so.<br>

One approach to reduce need for speed is to become more focused in shooting and get the pictures right in the camera rather than rely on post processing. </p>

[mark_sirota1]

<p>Sheldon, you're entitled to your opinion regarding the importance of disk I/O for Lightroom; we'll have to respectfully disagree. I agree it would be hard to approach the limit of a SATA interface, but the interface speed is almost never the bottleneck.</p>

[chris_letts]

<p>I don't use Lightroom (use NX2) but for what it's worth on my quad core Win7 64 bit machine I gained a quantum (!) speed jump processing images when I tweaked my Virus Scanner to NOT do virus checks on jpeg/nef/tif files (i.e. add them to the exclusion list)</p>

[chris_letts]

<p>By the way I agree that disk speed is not a significant factor !</p>

[paul_reklaitis]

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_XT5" target="_blank">Cray XT-5</a> should do the trick!<br>

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_XT5" target="_blank"></a></p>

[test11664875106]

<p>Ben,</p>

<p>have you tried Lightroom 3 Beta 2 from Adobe Labs? Adobe has supposedly rewritten a lot of code to better utilise multi-core hardware in Apple boxes.</p>

<p>Also, Lightroom is disk i/o intensive, if this is what limits your performance currently, you're unlikely to see significant speed gain from changing the horse. Are your images on internal or external drive? Getting external RAID5 disk array with gigabit connection (under 1000 EUR for 4 disk versions) may make bigger difference for you than changing CPU, graphics cards and operating system.</p>

[mark_sirota1]

<p>Those of you who believe disk speed isn't a significant factor:<br>

- Create a small catalog on the same disk as a set of originals, on a conventional hard disk.<br>

- delete the Previews database, then time how long it takes to generate all previews.<br>

Then copy the catalog and originals to a ramdisk or fast SSD and repeat the test. I expect a significant improvement, you all expect little. Let's see who's right. And that, of course, is an oversimplified test, since it's still all on one disk and we haven't played with the location of the ACR cache or operating system.</p>

<p>The performance of the rest of the system will matter as well, of course. Not all systems will get the same results, but I'd expect any average machine to get a significant improvement.</p>

<p>Chris -- you're quite right, virus checkers should be configured not to get in the way of disk I/O for Lightroom, if performance is your goal. This can be a HUGE performance killer.</p>

[adamczyk]

<p>Picked up middle of the road Gateway computer at the local electronics super store last year with a 64 bit version of Vista, and my lightroom catalog has probably 16,000+ images and it super fast, I have very little lag time between any functions. </p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>I agree that disk speed is a significant factor. I've upgraded hdd's many times (and going raid o) within the same machine to empirically conclude that it is as important as cpu and ram when building a performance box.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p><em>Velociraptors are a waste of money, even the new ones.</em><br /><em> 2 x 1GB Samsung Spinpoint F3's or WD Caviar Blacks Short Stroked to 500GB in a RAID 0 array offer similar performance for less money, noise and heat.</em><br /><em> SSD's are a worthwhile investment as they speed up the general operation of a PC, I recently installed Win7 Pro onto a Intel X25-M 80GB SSD; booting is super quick and apps open more or less instantly. With most SSD's now offering TRIM support any fears over the lifespan of SSDs can be laid to rest.</em><br /><em> One caveat to SSDs is to make sure the motherboard is using an Intel matrix storage controller such as the ICH10R - X58 Socket 1366 i7 boards will have this, so it's a sort of moot point for a new i7 build anyway.</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>Martin, there's no contest. The new Velociraptors are the fastest hdd you can buy. But while you're at it, may as well compare a Velociraptor to a 15K drive and trash them as junk too, lol. How about two Velociraptors in Raid O against two Samsung's in raid O? The maintenance and risks of Raid and short-stroking isn't for everyone.</p>

<p>SSD's are a waste of money at the moment and certainly aren't worth the cost and risk for a little bit of boot time. They don't have a the sustained write times of physical hdd's and a photoshop computer with a fast hdd (or even a Velociraptor) will out-perform a ssd computer when we write (save) our files. Not sure about you MArtin, but I do more file saving than booting up.</p>

<p> </p>

[martin_engineer]

<p>It all comes down to how much you want to spend....<br>

Sheldon, the ATI 5770 will support up to 3 monitors on it's own, so you don't need a second card for that.<br>

The Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black drives are pretty fast, so I would give a thumbs up to those. Yes, disk I/O speed is important for everything. I get to play with old disks that read/write at around 30 MB/sec and new ones like the Caviar Black drives that read/write at around 90-100 MB/sec... there is a very noticeable difference in performance. <br>

Intel Core i7-920 - - - $279.99<br>

Asus CrossFireX Motherboard - - - $184.99<br>

XFX 5770 - - - $159.99<br>

OCZ Gold 6 GB kit - - - $178.99<br>

WD Caviar Black - 1 TB - - -$104.99 <br>

WD Caviar Black - 1 TB - - -$104.99 * A second one for RAID 1 backup configuration<br>

Intel X25-M Gen 2 - - - $211.99<br>

CoolMaster Centurion Case - - - $49.99<br>

Antec TruePower TP-650 - - - $109.99<br>

Sony CD/DVD Burner - - - $22.99<br>

TOTAL = $1408.90</p>

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[garrison_k.]

<p>I'd only look at mobo's with new sata, 6gb/s, and not the older 3gb/s. USB3 is out as well. Be careful and do not go with old stock on sub $200 mobo's.</p>