Upgrading from i5 to an i7 - advice please.

[John Walker]

UPDATE@  Sorted by Steve Grisetti of Muvipix 

 

 

A question for our techie members.

 

My current system - Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H  Motherboard   -   i5 4690K  3.5Ghz CPU  -   16 Gb RAM

 

Can I just upgrade to an i7 CPU with the above setup?  Is it just a matter of a straight exchange and am I likely to see any advantage?

 

Used for RAW files in Photoshop and 4k video in Premiere

 

John

Edited August 27, 2019 by John Walker
advice no longer required

[Robert M Estall]

My i7 iMac should be faster than my wife's 15 iMac (both 27") but I'm not entirely convinced. She pushed the boat out and installed a SSD which boots a lot faster but otherwise I don't see a lot of difference. She swears at hers more than I do at mine.

[spacecadet]

8 minutes ago, Robert M Estall said:

My i7 iMac should be faster than my wife's 15 iMac (both 27") but I'm not entirely convinced. She pushed the boat out and installed a SSD which boots a lot faster but otherwise I don't see a lot of difference. She swears at hers more than I do at mine.

Surely, swears by it.

[Johnnie5]

It looks like your motherboard will support generation 4 and 5 Intel processors.  Your motherboard will also support an M.2 drive which would speed things up also.  You can make the M.2 drive your boot drive and put your photo processing software on there too.  I would install an Solid state drive or the M.2 drive and make sure I had a good video card before changing the CPU.

Here is info on your MB https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/GA-Z97X-UD3H-rev-10#ov

 

M.2 drives https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=M.2+drives

[Robert M Estall]

Their you go there John, Johnnie5 clearly knows his onions. Without his techy knowledge, I think upgrading the CPU is the least worthy of your options. These days, RAM is cheap and the first upgrade to consider. I think back to the days I managed to get my database to start up in a RAM disk and suddenly I was running at warp speed (as they did in startreck) If you have a big old-fashioned desktop you can pull stuff in and out. My old Mac G4 had lots of room for drives and cards, now that so many of us have iMacs or iMac look-a-likes, we have fewer options

[Stephen Lloyd]

remember when looking at the RAM ,what speed is it? DDR4/DDR3? What can the board take? I used to do all my own builds but less so now. Solid states are good - but higher capacity comes at a price. If using windows it can mean a reinstall and reconfigure if you don't want Win10 to try to send everything, including some app files, to the Windows Drive option. After a recent crash I rebuilt and speed only came back after I'd made windows do what I wanted and not what MS did.

[Johnnie5]

The idea of adding a good video card is to remove some of the burden off of the CPU.  This is only if you are using the onboard video on the motherboard, adding more RAM first may not give you a big boost in performance.  Here is a link to a list of recommended  graphic processors (GPU).  The best way is to figure out how much your willing to spend on a card and shop around.  I am using and Geforce GTX 750 ti which is an older card.  They come with varying amount of RAM, more RAM more cost.

Suggested graphics cards

Graphics cards released in the year 2014 or afterwards that meet the minimum system requirements (listed above) should work.

• AMD: For AMD cards, consider using the Radeon R9 series of cards, such as the R9 270 through 290.
• NVIDIA: For NVIDIA cards, consider using a card from the GeForce GTX 760+ line (760, 770, 780, or later) or from the GeForce GTX 900 series.
• Intel: For Intel cards, Intel HD Graphics 4400+, 5000+, 510+, P530, P630, Iris Pro Graphics 5200, 6100+, P6300, P580 or later are required.

 

  https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-gpu-faq.html 

[MizBrown]

On 29/08/2019 at 02:49, Stephen Lloyd said:

Solid states are good - but higher capacity comes at a price. If using windows it can mean a reinstall and reconfigure if you don't want Win10 to try to send everything, including some app files, to the Windows Drive option. After a recent crash I rebuilt and speed only came back after I'd made windows do what I wanted and not what MS did.
 

Macrium Reflect did an excellent job of moving my boot and application partitions to a new SSD M.2 drive.  There are videos on YouTube that will talk you through the process.  Photos, videos, and such get stored on the spinning disk drive. 

 

From everything I've read, variations in i7 or i5 are more significant than i7 vs. i5.  Look at the clock speed.

[John Walker]

Many thanks for all your suggestions.  I already have 32Gb RAM and an SSD installed as my 😄 Drive - love the way it boots Win10 in record time.

 

I'm considering adding a 2Gb SSD as my main working storage drive now that the price has dropped (still expensive though).  Will leave my back up data drives as HDDs for now.

 

Reading your advice Johnnie5, possibly upgrading my graphics card is the way to go.  I have an AMD Radeon HD 5450 at present - perhaps the weak link in my system?.

 

John

[Johnnie5]

Lightroom version 8.2 has a new feature called Enhance Details that will require a Video card with more processing power and Photoshop can already benefit more GPU power.  Here is an article with some test results that would be a good guide to purchasing a new video card. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Lightroom-Classic-CC-2019-Enhanced-Details-GPU-Performance-1366/

 

Here is an Adobe article on the feature. https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/enhance-details.htm

 

You need the latest version of Windows 10 for this to work.  Windows update tells me that my machine isn't ready yet (whatever that means) and all I have to do is wait.  I built my computer back in 2012 so CPU and motherboard are antiques now.  The nice thing about a custom built computer is you can replace things piecemeal without having to throw the whole thing in the trash.  You don't have to worry about a lot proprietary components that could be expensive or hard to find.

[John Walker]

Looks like my GPU is the weak point so will follow up your suggestion Johnnie5.  It looks like some of the suggested GPU's require a double bay so need to check if there's room.  It's 4 years since I built it.       Thank you.

 

UserBenchmarks:
CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K - 69.7%
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 5450 - 1.1%
SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 500GB - 113.6%
HDD: Seagate Expansion Desk 2TB - 69.4%
HDD: WD Blue 1TB (2012) - 103.8%
HDD: WD Black 2.5" 750GB (2013) - 65.3%
HDD: Seagate Expansion Desk 2TB - 87.6%
USB: Seagate Expansion Desk 2TB - 50.1%
USB: SDHC Card 32GB - 31.3%
RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR3 1866 C10 4x4GB - 70.8%
MBD: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-CF
 

[Johnnie5]

Something to consider when upgrading or buying new computer would be getting a good graphics card.  Lightroom has a new feature called Enhance Details which has certain system requirements.  I have been using it for a couple of weeks and its not a dramatic difference, but knowing Adobe they will keep working on it.  Here is a link to Adobe's page with links to system requirements.  https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/enhance-details.html