Which hardware upgrade to solve The Unbearable Slowness of Lightroom 3?

Question

Hello,
I’m not going to start another thread about the slowness of Lightroom 3 because I also encounter most of the problems mentioned in the forums since upgrading to LR3: very slow response when using Adjustment Brush (which was already really slow on my machine when using LR2), loading images in Develope Module could take up to 30 seconds, browsing through the images takes forever, etc. I read lots of threads and tried several solutions but nothing works. There is no fun in post-processing images anymore.
I’m planning to upgrade my 4y old hardware very soon. Currently I’m using an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4Ghz, 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, Windows XP 32-bit, Nvidia 8800GT with 1GB RAM, WD Velociraptor (for OS, LR Catalogs, LR Cache).
I’m worried that my upgrade to faster hardware won’t solve my performance issues. I called a colleague-photographer last week who bought a MacPro dual quad-core 2.26Ghz and 8GB RAM in December last year and claims that his LR catalog with 150K images works very fast and smooth. On the other side, I have read several contradictory stories on the Adobe Forums where fast configurations also suffer performance issues, but where also normal configurations work more than fast enough. It remains vague what causes Lightroom to slow down. Probably multiple factors?
According to your experiences, which hardware upgrade will give Lightroom 3 the highest performance boost in comparison with my current system?
- Custom pc upgrade Win7 64-bit, Intel i7-930 2.8Ghz quad-core, 9 or 12GB DDR3-1600 RAM
- Custom pc upgrade Win7 64-bit, Intel i7-980 (or i7-970) six-core, 9 or 12GB DDR3-1600 RAM
- MacPro with dual quad-core 2.4Ghz, 8 or 10GB DDR3-1066 RAM
- MacPro single six-core 3.33Ghz, 8 or 10GB DDR3-1333 RAM
Is my videocard of any importance? I mean, do I choose Nvidia or ATI?
Thanks!

Answer 1

ambienttroutmask wrote:
Using an on board graphics card will just not drive monitors correctly at high resolutions and also will use the computers RAM. If you are running LR on a single low resolution monitor then on board graphics cards may be fine...but otherwise a separate card is absolutely a requirement.
I have no doubt that the above quote was meant to be helpful, but a separate (discrete) card is absolutely NOT a requirement for anyone specing a new machine for Lightroom.
Lightroom does not currently use graphics card/chips to do any image rendering.  Things like demosaicing, noise reduction, sharpening and lens/perspective correction happen exactly at the same speed with integrated graphics as they do with $500 graphics cards.  And displaying an image on high or low resolution monitors is handled by a low-level component know as a RAMDAC - which is independent of whether you have integrated or discrete graphics.
My dual core deskside and notebook computers running Win 7-64 are each capable of delivering about the same Lightroom performance.  But in practice, I find that my deskside is much better for rendering because my new notebook only uses Turbo Boost to run at 3 GHz for a minute or two, before it throttles back because of heat (notebook CPU fans are much smaller than desktop/deskside fans).  A discrete card would only excerbate the heat problem on my notebook and wouldn't add anything but cost for Lightroom on my 8GB deskside.
Some details for folks interested in the technical bits:
I have two systems that I use Lightroom on.  Both have intel dual cores, have integrated graphics and run Win7-64.  The older deskside has a 3 GHz e8400 with integrated graphics implemented on a separate chip, 8GB of memory and 4 internal disk drives.  The newer notebook has a 2.4 to 2.9 GHz i5-520M with 4GB of memory, graphics embeded in the CPU chip and two internal disk drives. There is no Lightroom use case that would benefit buy  "upgrading" either of these two machines to use a separate graphics card - except one.  If I were routinely processing images much larger than almost all photographers create, a discreet card could help expand memory.  But if memory is the constraint, it makes much more sense to add it directly to the base machine that it does to spend more money on a separate graphics card.
Dan