Upgrading Windows laptop

[astral]

The latest core i7 processors are more powerful and run cooler
I have an HP Probook G450.
The main advantage is an internal M2 slot for an SSD drive in addition to the standard HD
Not well mentioned in the specs. I only came across it in a review
I have a Samsung 250Gb installed with a transfer rate of 6Gb/s making it very fast
The graphics are Nvidia® GeForce 930MX (2 GB DDR3 dedicated, switchable)

Now I don't know if this will handle your Lightroom requirements but at around $1000
it is worth looking at.

 

[agnieszka]

Forgot to ask: did you check the performance tab in task manager to see what is limiting your current laptop? Check in idle state and when running Lightroom.
Makes it easier to see what Lightroom needs to perform better.

Jan

Hadn't thought of that.

So while idling, CPU is at around 4% (at 0.77 GHz out of a max 2.4 GHz). Memory sits at 2Gb of 7.9 Gb. Disk would jump between 0% to 13%.

Moving the mouse, CPU jumps to 18% but remains at 0.77 GHz.
Opening anything CPU would grow before briefly spiking at 100% then diminish again. Rarely goes above 0.77 GHz.
Having LR open, Memory sits at 4.1 Gb/7.9 Gb. Created a panorama of 14 images, CPU had moments at 60% and even once for to 1.9 GHz, memory went to a max of about 6.9 Gb, and disk was all over the place. The image merging took a few minutes to do its preview thing, then same again to create.

Opening a picture and having the preview 'loading...' takes the CPU up to about 52% (still at 0.77GHz) but each image takes about 10 sec to fully 'load', which is a pain but creating 1:1 previews takes FOR EVER, so I rarely do it unless I have the luxury of being able to set it up for an overnight run for a large set of images (even then, not always finished by morning). Memory hovers around 3.4 Gb.
Shutting down LR and having it do it's catalogue backup and verification thingy disk is at 100%, memory at 4.5 Gb, CPU at around 15% 0.77 Ghz.

Now i'm running MS Edge (only 5 tabs open at the mo), and while LR shut down, had task manager, a file browser, and also MS Word open - I had to wait a couple of minutes for my Edge tab to 'unfreeze' so I could keep writing this post, even after the disk dropped from 100%. Memory sitting at 3.2 Gb.

It seems the "Disk" is the only thing that's maxing out to any real degree, but even when it's not maxed, the system crawls. I don't even know what Disk 100% means - is it the page system file? is it the remaining free disk space on the computer (82.6Gb of 914 Gb)? something else?

 

[archaeopteryx]

Yeah, there's rather too much low quality information about Task Manager's performance tab on a search. If you want a more technical look at monitoring drives one starting point might be here. In summary, disk active time is the percentage of ticks during which a read and/or write occurred. You'll want to look at response time and read and write speeds as well. I'm guessing this is a 1TB HDD and what you'll see is high response times. If so, the question then becomes why, which is where things like the above link start to be interesting.

More generally, what you're describing is referred to as an IO bound workload. So it may be interesting to read up about that.

 

[agnieszka]

Yeah, there's rather too much low quality information about Task Manager's performance tab on a search. If you want a more technical look at monitoring drives one starting point might be here. In summary, disk active time is the percentage of ticks during which a read and/or write occurred. You'll want to look at response time and read and write speeds as well. I'm guessing this is a 1TB HDD and what you'll see is high response times. If so, the question then becomes why, which is where things like the above link start to be interesting.

More generally, what you're describing is referred to as an IO bound workload. So it may be interesting to read up about that.

OMGosh, thanks for the link but I feel that by the time I learned how to get that info out of my computer, and how to interpret it, there might be 9th gen CPUs out!

 

[Replytoken]

With respect to screens, you will want to decide if you want a glossy or non-glare screen in addition to getting one with good color gamut. And, you will need to decide on resolution as well.

Good luck,

--Ken

 

[uscrx]

Not so simple though, JanW: my current laptop has i7 and Nvidia and 1TB HDD and yet struggles with lightroom. granted it doesn't boast dual disk (SSD+HDD), but I think the 8Gb RAM isn't quite up for the task. When I've compared benchmarks of newer graphics cards - i'm looking at Nvidia GTX 1060 at the moment - they are >1000% improvement on the Nvidia GT 820M that my little acer has. I think that will count for something too. (correct me if i'm wrong).

I have a rule.. anecdotal as it may be. For Photoshop and Video editing, minimum 16 GB of RAM.

 

[dwig]

I have a rule.. anecdotal as it may be. For Photoshop and Video editing, minimum 16 GB of RAM.

For video, 8gb minimum and 16gb+ highly recommended.
For Ps, I get along just fine at home on Win10 with 8gb but I run Ps "naked" (read: no extra plugins). I don't have issues with 12-16mp RAW files and most normal editing, even with both Ps and Lr running at the same time. When I'm doing serious editing, I never have any other apps running. At work, I used to us Ps on 16gb RAM (older PowerMac) with Lr, email, browser, and several other apps running as well. It ran OK, but performance with large files (read: 1gb and larger) was poor. I now run a full blown iMac with 32gb RAM with no issues.

 

[agnieszka]

With respect to screens, you will want to decide if you want a glossy or non-glare screen in addition to getting one with good color gamut. And, you will need to decide on resolution as well.

Good luck,

--Ken

yes I've decided against 4K at the moment. FHD is all I need.

 

[Replytoken]

yes I've decided against 4K at the moment. FHD is all I need.

When you get closer, you may want to see if this site has a review of any model you are interested in purchasing - Notebook / Laptop Reviews and News . I like their reviews and find them helpful, especially around screens.

--Ken

 

[agnieszka]

well, i've made a purchase.
Acer Nitro 5 Spin NP515-51-875P 15.6" Gaming Laptop

yet to arrive by courier (no later than 15th Jan, says the current info). Thanks everyone for all their input. I re-did the task manager performance observations again when I was doing real-world usage of lightroom (pick and reject flags on a new set of images I recently took) and discovered that the CPU was maxing out most of the time at 100% of 2.8 Ghz (which is interesting coz my CPU is rated to max 2.4 GHz - could be overclocked but not sure how to check, and doesn't really matter now anyway), so I settled on searching for a laptop that specifically had the 8th gen CPU.

Adding my other wishlist items (without necessarily aiming for dedicated GPU) I was drawn to the Acer Nitro 5: IPS screen, 16 Gb RAM, 8th gen CPU, 256Gb SSD, and 2Tb HDD - and only the gaming laptops had these features that were at a good price-point (yes, I could have had these features on other brands that had no GPU, but their cost was astronomical by comparison). The only drawback I found in (one) YouTube review on the Acer was the heat sink pipes and fans (physical location not ideal), but as i'm not going to be gaming in the foreseeable future (maybe once or twice - if at all - for a bit of harmless fun), I don't think this will be a particular problem for me. Being such a new laptop it wasn't available on many other review sites, so I hope it isn't a lemon but meh. I thought about waiting for other brands (e.g. HP Omen) to come out with their 8th gen CPU laptops but I live in the outback and am on the coast for the school holidays, so harder to do preliminary tests and return if anything is wrong on delivery).

it also comes bundled with a VR headset, which may or may not be useful/fun. I know a lot of people are re-selling their headset to get some cashback on their laptop but I wanna try it out!

cheers,
Agnieszka.

 

[archaeopteryx]

(which is interesting coz my CPU is rated to max 2.4 GHz)

Turbo Boost is basically an indication Lightroom isn't using AVX or AVX2.

 

[Replytoken]

well, i've made a purchase.
Acer Nitro 5 Spin NP515-51-875P 15.6" Gaming Laptop

I hope it is everything that you want (and need)! One question, if I may. You were not interested in any Asus products. Did you have problems in the past with them? I ask as I have been mulling over a new laptop, and they have a few models that I have under consideration (among others).

--Ken

 

[tkbslc]

I have a rule.. anecdotal as it may be. For Photoshop and Video editing, minimum 16 GB of RAM.

I can't seem to use more than 5-6GB doing heavy edits if I try. I have 12, but it's rarely above 50% use.

 

[tkbslc]

well, i've made a purchase.
Acer Nitro 5 Spin NP515-51-875P 15.6" Gaming Laptop

Great choice and that should be an incredible machine.

 

[astral]

Hadn't thought of that.

It seems the "Disk" is the only thing that's maxing out to any real degree, but even when it's not maxed, the system crawls. I don't even know what Disk 100% means - is it the page system file? is it the remaining free disk space on the computer (82.6Gb of 914 Gb)? something else?

It is the transfer rate to and from the disk.
That suggests to me that an upgrade to SSD will improve matters.
Make sure your Page File is on the SSD, also your application, to get the maximum benefit.

Though you HD is pretty full, so files may be fragmented causing the disk heads to spend time searching.
Can you off load some data to an external disk and see if that helps

 

[wjiang]

Paging is a big no-no for performance - you should aim to get enough RAM to ensure that you never even come close to needing paging out to disk. I'd say 8 GB is the bare minimum for RAM these days for 20-ish MP straight RAW conversion (e.g. LR/ACR), but if you do any higher resolution stuff (high-res shot, panoramas) or stacking in say PS, you should get at least 16 GB. I've definitely hit 10 or more GB used doing big panoramas, focus and astrophotography stacks with just 16 MP sources.

For bulk RAW conversion, I/O speed for reading and writing out to disk can be a bottleneck, but I suspect only for very slow HDDs. When I bulk convert RAWs using ACR from my 850 EVO SSD (which is only SATA, not even NVMe), it's the CPU that gets fully loaded.

 

[uscrx]

I can't seem to use more than 5-6GB doing heavy edits if I try. I have 12, but it's rarely above 50% use.

I've had both my laptop and desktop with 16GB RAM struggle processing RAW files from Canon 5dsr. Of course I had to bump up the memory use capacity on PS CS to remedy that.

And now with high bit video files, I'm thinking I will need 32 GB!

 

[uscrx]

So I'm selling a barely used 2015 iMac 27 incher. While cleaning up the computer to get it ready, I realized I had stuffed in extra RAM to 24 GB. I absolutely loathed the way Mac operates. So it sat for 2 years.

 

[beameup]

When I first started serious processing of HDR images with Photoshop, I bought a Toshiba laptop with i7 second generation and 8 GB of RAM. I immediately bought an SSD and installed it. This boosted my start-up "boot" to 6 seconds and SIGNIFICANTLY boosted the processing power. After that I bought a USB 1TB backup drive and partitioned it to store all my processed images. I see no reason to upgrade as the current setup has been working fine for 5 years now.
BTW, the GPU "video card" (or whatever you call it) is built into the Intel CPU in a laptop.

 

[archaeopteryx]

For bulk RAW conversion, I/O speed for reading and writing out to disk can be a bottleneck, but I suspect only for very slow HDDs.

It depends on what's being done in the bulk processing and how efficiently structured the operations are. As an example that's probably more on the IO bound end of the range, the bulk image assessment I run most frequently saturates a basic SSD at 50 MB/s with 60% CPU from one worker thread on each hyperthreaded core. Scheduling four threads puts CPU to 100% but decreases disk to 40MB/s due to contention. Taken simply, the extra CPU looks good but it's actually indication of slower execution. Also, in the half of the threading capability that's used, the code's running 128 bit rather than 256 bit SIMD, so less than 30% of the available processing power is employed. And, as the assessment results accumulate in memory, that's with the SSD doing only reads. Writing images back out would likely range from IO neutral (output files of comparable size with comparable compression effort on increased core utilization) to tripling IO pressure (output files uncompressed and therefore substantially larger than the input files).

stacking in say PS, you should get at least 16 GB

As an aside, I focus stack 4k in Helicon with no significant pressure on 12GB.