Hi!
I mainly use my desktop for Adobe Lightroom, watching YouTube and a little coding. I find that exporting videos (by applying a custom preset) and generating 1:1 previews is slow and my goal is to improve Lightroom performance.
Hardware setup:
AMD A4-3400 APU 2.7GHz
ASUS F1A55-M LE
2x8GB DDR3 Kingston HyperX FURY 1866MHz
Crucial MX100 256GB SSD -- Windows 7 installed here. Approx 170GB free space.
Seagate 2TB 7200RPM
EVGA GTX 750Ti SC 2GB
380W Antec EarthWatts
Lightroom setup:
The Lightroom catalog, previews and cache are on the SSD while the images are on the Seagate drive. The catalog has around 1300 images/videos.
OS:
Windows 7 64 bit professional
What I already tried:
Kill all extra programs, e.g. TrendMicro AV and Comodo firewall, those are the biggest CPU hoggers.
Observations:
CPU: Maxed out at 100%
RAM: Around 10GB free out of 16GB
SSD: I tried to see if the SSD could be a bottleneck, so I downloaded the CrystalDiskMark benchmark to test its performance. I got sequential read/write around 190MB/sec and this is almost identical to the Seagate values. I was expecting values around 400MB/sec as those are the advertised ones.
Questions:
Considering that
a. I'm using a fairly "low power" CPU
b. My catalog/cache are already on the SSD
I think it might be worth doing a CPU upgrade to boost performance noticeably, preferably 4x or more, within a budget of $600 to $800.
- CPU: I am considering upgrading to a faster CPU/Motherboard that will be compatible with my RAM. Two options I am considering are AMD FX-8350 w/ Asus Sabertooth (costs around $350 total) or Intel i7-4790 w/ equivalent motherboard (costs around $450 total). cpubenchmark lists my existing A4-3400 with a pretty low value ~ 1600, while the above choices are ~ 9000-10000. Should I expect a 6x improvement in the speed of exporting my images/videos with the new CPU?
- SSD: The motherboard only has SATA 3GB/s connections, so I wonder if this is why the SSD is underutilized and perhaps those numbers would be achievable with a 6GB/s mobo. Maybe the SATA cable is faulty? Perhaps CrystalDiskMark isn't a good benchmark and I should be ignoring those numbers. Would I be better off spending $300 on say 3 256GB SSDs in a RAID 0 to store my images instead of spending a similar amount on the CPU upgrade?
Any inputs/advice/comments/opinions would be appreciated.
Thanks,
tanager4