Lightroom Editing Machine

d3sl91 · October 9, 2018

Hey All,

I have been overseas for the past year, and have been out of the loop for about a year and a half when it comes to CPUs, specifically.

My wife and I are headed back to the US in a month, and my wife mentioned wanting a desktop once we get back, with the primary function being heavy Lightroom and (very) minor video editing. Lightroom will be a money making use of the system, so, is the primary focus.

How do the current AMD vs Intel offerings stack up for a Lightroom user? How much of a hit do I get for going with a Ryzen 5 CPU or an i5 vs something like an i7 or threadripper for Lightroom?

Normally I'd spend hours researching this stuff, but I simply do not have the time right now. So, give me some recommendations on CPUs, and even builds!

Location: USA
Budget: $800 USD (Flexible, but, this is the target at the moment)
Don't need any peripherals.
Smaller the better (ITX or mATX preferred).

kirashi · October 9, 2018

31 minutes ago, d3sl91 said:

My wife and I are headed back to the US in a month, and my wife mentioned wanting a desktop once we get back, with the primary function being heavy Lightroom and (very) minor video editing. Lightroom will be a money making use of the system, so, is the primary focus.

How do the current AMD vs Intel offerings stack up for a Lightroom user?

How much of a hit do I get for going with a Ryzen 5 CPU or an i5 vs something like an i7 or threadripper for Lightroom?

Ahoy fellow Lightroom user's partner! I'll preface my 2 bits by saying that I've been unmotivated to actually get into my old Photography workflow, so much that I've got photos strewn across memory cards that aren't backed up. Yeah, I know, bad practice, but I've just lost all motivation to get back into photography for the time being.

Anywho, as an avid Lightroom user, I do remember using it on my old 15" Macbook Air (ahem, I mean, Samsung Series 9 2012) with an aging i5-3317u, 8GB RAM, and a 500GB mSATA HDD - no GPU aside from the integrated Intel HD Graphics. Lightroom 4 ran pretty decently on that, even when batch importing or HDR merging, so I'd say you could easily get away with a mid-tier CPU such as an Intel i5-8400 or whatever the AMD equivalent is these days. (sorry, I'm not much help in AMD land anymore as I haven't had to build and AMD system since the FX-8350 was the fiery king of their lineup.)

Now, if you figure she's going to be expanding on the video editing forefront, it might be worth looking into the cost to performance that an i7 or threadripper upgrade would bring, depending on how other software aside from Lightroom would benefit, but again, if video editing is minimal, you can totally make an 8th gen Intel i5 CPU work fine, as the advancements Intel has made between 4th/5th gen and 8th gen CPUs is huge. Same goes for needing a GPU - if you have the budget, and video is a focus, sure, get one, but otherwise Intel's integrated graphics have improved leaps and bounds.

The main thing I'd highly recommend for any Lightroom user is having a LARGE amount of SSD-based storage, as flipping through photos & media stored on spinning rust disks is a huge bottleneck when paired with a fast CPU - heck, I'd rather edit on a 4th gen i3 system with SSD-based storage than have an i9 based system crippled by an HDD for my main storage drive. I also recommend a backup NAS - either something you build yourself, or a Synology unit if you just want to "set it and forget it", in addition to some kind of off-site backup. If you've got any other Q's, just ask away.