Hardware upgrade

canuck257

Senior Member
I plan on upgrading the RAM and Graphics card on my Windows 8.1 desktop to speed up LR and PS. I know more RAM is better but how much would be sensible for these programs? I would also like some ideas on Graphics cards about which I know very little. So many of the ones I have looked at seem to be for video gaming.
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
If I ever open a computer to upgrade RAM, at this point, I'd look up the specs for the motherboard, and upgrade to the maximum the motherboard will support. Anything less, and you're wasting your time, and just getting your hands dirty...
 

RocketCowboy

Senior Member
I agree with Fred ... do it once and be done with it (upgrading RAM that is). The more the better, but I don't have anything with less than 8GB of RAM, and have a couple systems with 96GB.
 

10 Gauge

Senior Member
As far as RAM goes, I can eat up the 16gb in my desktop fairly easily when I have PS, LR, and DxO open and editing in all 3 at once. I wouldn't recommend less than 16gb personally. I am getting ready to do a few upgrades in the near future and will expand up to 32gb which should be plenty for what I do.

There are a ton of variables for video card options, definitely need more specifics.
 
For graphics cards, pixels is pixels, and you're not doing much with them editing static images. I could be wrong but I don't think PS and LR ask the GPU to do much of anything besides display pixels. There may be some filters out their that do, but I would call Adobe and ask?

If they're not offloading rendering to the GPU, a pricey graphics card will be of little help performance-wise; and all your money should go to RAM and an SSD (if you don't already one).
 

Bourbon Neat

Senior Member
In my experience, the ssd is far less dependent on ram. While batch converting files, the ssd's in raid-0 do all of the work while ram just idles along. With this rig, the 16bg ram rarely gets a hard workout. If you are using spinners then it is best to load up to the max. For graphics cards I may be in the dark but here is my thought. The graphics card renders your edits for your display, the better card will be quicker than a lesser. I have no complaints with this nVidia G-force something or other.
 
The graphics card renders your edits for your display, the better card will be quicker than a lesser.

IIRC, in lightroom, only the CPU does the rendering. The difference between a high end graphics card and even on-board graphics in drawing the already rendered bitmap from the buffer to the display will be negligible.

Now it appears that newer versions of PS are using GPU for its "Mercury" engine, and expectedly, this is mostly in the area of motion graphics and 3D rendering such as [FONT=Lato, Open Sans, sans-serif] liquify, focus mask, warp, etc. Again, unless your doing serious video and/or motion graphics, spending a lot of money on a video card is a waste of money (unless you're a gamer).[/FONT]

[FONT=Lato, Open Sans, sans-serif]I am sure Adobe has a list of 'tested' graphics cards on their site. I stand by my original assessment that even with a mediocre, dedicated graphics card, I/O will be your bottleneck. If it don't all fit into RAM, it is gonna get swapped out. Here, SSD (at least for the scratch disk) and lots of RAM are the better way to go.[/FONT]
 

canuck257

Senior Member
Thanks for all the input guys. My motherboard will only support a maximum of 16gb so I am going to upgrade from the existing 8gb to 16gb as a first step and leave the graphics card until later; maybe.

Would one of you care to explain what an SSD and a scratch disk is and why it is advantageous?
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
An SSD is a SolidStateDrive... no moving parts... a regular hard disk spins... think of it as an old time record player with an arm... it takes time for the arm to move from one position/cut to another... by comparison, the SSD is magnitudes faster... They're usually used to hold the Operating system because programs frequently make calls to the OS to do things... so using the faster drive to host the OS generally speeds up the system's over-all performance. You'll notice that SSD drives are more expensive than regular rotating disks... although, their prices have been coming down markedly as they become more popular...
 
SSD=Solid State Drive. This will reduce disk access times (in some respects) by a factor of 100. If your system is on one, you will see boot times and app launch times reduced by a factor 10. And they're pretty cheap now a days... check out the Kingston HyperX Savage for a good budget drive. In fact these drives are getting to the point where their performance actually exceeds the SATA 3 bus (which hopefully you have on your mother board). You can go even faster by getting SSD with a PCIE interface (see the Kingston Predator). We're talking R/W in excess of 1GB/sec, albeit at about twice the price currently.

Scratch disk is physical drive space where memory overflow resides. It is by default your system volume, but PS lets you assign another volume if you wish.
 
A little more detail on the scratch disk...

When the system can not fit everything it is working on into physical RAM, it swaps out pages of memory to a physical drive, and recalls them as needed. The more page outs you have, the slower things will become. Of course this is also determined by the speed at which those pages outs can be written to and read from the drive.

So, the more RAM you have, the less page outs. And the faster your drive, the less time those page outs will take.

IIRC, PS has an optimized scheme regarding handling its own scratch disk operations instead of just blindly handing it off to the OS.

You may notice a little speed increase in day to day operations with the extra RAM. In the case of the SSD, after booting your PC for the first time, and playing with it for a few minutes, you'll wonder how you ever got along without one.

Again if your motherboard does not have a SATA interface, spend the extra hundred and get the PCIE version (assuming you have an open slot).
 
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10 Gauge

Senior Member
@ScottinPollock You seem pretty knowledgeable, do you might know what's going on here.... If you notice under the "Graphics" section at the bottom it says "Crossfire Disabled", I definitely have it enabled in the CCC. Glitch in Win10 drivers perhaps?

Capture.jpg
 
@ScottinPollock You seem pretty knowledgeable


Heh heh... I am afraid my sole use of Windows since the 2000's has been in VM's, so never had CrossfireX or SLi at my disposal. Driver issue is a fair assumption though (there have been a number of them). Info is scarce though, so maybe time to shoot a note off to ATI/AMD.
 

canuck257

Senior Member
Thanks again guys, I am really learning a great deal from you all.

I have another question which is, I see that the Kingston Savage is a 6Gb/s SSD. My motherboard is rated for 3Gb/s, does that mean that it will not work for me at all or will it just not reach full transfer speed? If my SATA rate does not work I do have 2 PCIe 2.0 x 16 slots if they would work better?
 
Thanks again guys, I am really learning a great deal from you all.

I have another question which is, I see that the Kingston Savage is a 6Gb/s SSD. My motherboard is rated for 3Gb/s, does that mean that it will not work for me at all or will it just not reach full transfer speed? If my SATA rate does not work I do have 2 PCIe 2.0 x 16 slots if they would work better?
It sounds as though your mother board has SATA 2. In which case it would definitely be worth spending the extra money for the PCIe based Predator.
 
To better answer your question... The Savage will work on your SATA bus, but it will be significantly slower than the drive is capable of.

SATA 3 is twice as fast as SATA 2, and the Predator is more than twice as fast as a Savage on SATA 3. So on your machine you'd be looking at about a 5x improvement with the Predator over the Savage.
 

canuck257

Senior Member
Again, my thanks for the information and explanation. I have decided to get the Predator which Amazon Canada has for around Ca$350. If I understand correctly, the next move would be to clone the existing operating system (Windows 8.8) and programs drive onto the SSD?
 
Again, my thanks for the information and explanation. I have decided to get the Predator which Amazon Canada has for around Ca$350.

That sounds like a lot. Is shipping high where you are, or is there some additional duty/taxes involved? In the States these things should be around 230-240 (287-299 Canadian) for the 240GB.

If I understand correctly, the next move would be to clone the existing operating system (Windows 8.8) and programs drive onto the SSD?

Good question. How long has it been since your system had a fresh install of Windows (not an upgrade)? If it has been a while, I would suggest doing a fresh install/restore, and then restore your user account from a backup and reinstall your apps. This helps clear out a lot of cruft that can be left behind from OS upgrades and apps you may have installed and no longer use. It is certainly more effort than cloning, but usually worth it if it hasn't been done in a while.

I think the Kingston package comes with a pretty good cloning tool if you decide to go that route.

Either way, I'd like to see the look on your face when you first boot your PC from the Predator!
 
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