Intel i5

[Ollokot]

Hi Folks,
Is the Intel i5 processor a good bet for use with the modern day Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC.

Regards Pat

[mastamak]

I reckon you need an I7 processor, Pat. That has been my practical experience, and coupled with PS and LR running on a solid state drive you will get a pretty slick performance. I am sure there are some experts on this forum who can give you all sorts of technical advice by my experience is entirely hands-on and I can say that when I upgraded to the above configuration it was like getting out of a Trabant and stepping into a Ferrari.
Grant

[Ollokot]

Thanks for that Grant, I'm trying to upgrade on a budget, which exact i7 would do the job.
Pat

[lunaticitizen]

How much is you budget? Intel i7 might be too expensive; and price-performance wise, I don't think i7 is a good choice. Photoshop or Lightroom is memory-bound rather than CPU-bound. Do you stitch images? Panoramic images involving large size of files will be hard on computers that have limited amount of memory.

I'd recommend this CPU.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B010T6CWI2

[Ollokot]

Hi Leo,
Thanks for that, realistic budget for the processor is around €250 to €300. If the one you recommend will work ok with photoshop and lightroom for all types of image processing it looks promising.
I hope to install a Geforce GTX 960 2GB graphics card, and have RAM of 32GB.

[xpatUSA]

I have recently upgraded to a new Dell Win 7, 16GB RAM, 4-cpu Core i5.

No Adobe on it but I have downloaded RawTherapee 64-bit version and it is satisfyingly speedy.

Even Sigma Photo Pro 32-bit (the world's slowest raw converter) has sped up quite dramatically.

Prior model was a 2-cpu, 6GB RAM, HP Pavilion (Pentium?)

[Black Pearl]

Last time I was chatting with the lads in one of my local Apple Stores they said the extra cost on an i7 over an i5 wasn't worth it for photography. So long as you have a decent GPU and a fast SSD you're good to go.

[pnodrog]

i5 should be fine and unless you are a gamer a GT730 or 750 graphics card will be all that is needed for photo editing. Spend the money saved on a SSD drive. Make sure the PC it has several USB3 ports most will but just check.

P.S. I use an i7 at home and an i5 at work and I have never noticed a great deal of difference. If there was I would be nagging for the work one to be upgraded...

[Manfred M]

Pat - desktop or laptop. Even though Intel uses the same processor naming conventions, there are significant design differences between laptop and desktop CPUs.

You can certainly get away with anything from an i3 through to an i7. The main difference between a desktop i5 and i7 is that the i7 is multi-threaded (two virtual processors per physical processor), which is great for software that takes advantage of this technology. So far as I know, Photoshop does not use multi-threading in basic PP work (I suspect that the video functionality does)..

There is a strange belief among some Photoshop users that Photoshop needs high end processing / graphics when it really does not. A decent modern processor at a reasonably clock speed, lots of RAM, a SSD (solid state drive as the main drive, rather than a standard hard disk) and a decent graphics card with 1GB onboard graphics RAM are what I would look at.

Check out Adobe's system requirements; you will note that the CPU spec is really the lowest speced part shown.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/sy...uirements.html

[lunaticitizen]

Hi Leo,
Thanks for that, realistic budget for the processor is around €250 to €300. If the one you recommend will work ok with photoshop and lightroom for all types of image processing it looks promising.
I hope to install a Geforce GTX 960 2GB graphics card, and have RAM of 32GB.

An i5 is more than enough. As already said you don't need a high-end CPU or GPU for Photoshop. A good amount of memory is fine. 8 GB is recommended, 16 GB is a lot even for decent image-stitching work.

I'd say spend the rest of the money to buy a good monitor, which unfortunately falls beyond my expertise.

[Ollokot]

Thank you all for your very informative replies, looks like it's the i5 for me.

Pat.

[dje]

One other thing Pat, make sure you go for 64 bit Windows.

When you say you are upgrading, are you talking of a completely new system ?

Dave

[royphot]

Hi.
I am using an Intel i5 in my desktop, and it is photoshopping quite happily. I haven't got any kind of Graphics Card in the Machine, or on the Motherboard, and just using the processor graphics. I do have 16Gb of Ram, and am thinking about an M2 SSD to speed things up, although it is anything but slow already

Roy.

[Ollokot]

Thank you Roy,
Hi Dave, yes a completely new system, self build from scratch.

Pat.

[pnodrog]

Thank you Roy,
Hi Dave, yes a completely new system, self build from scratch.

Pat.

Well I assume not absolutely from scratch - those surface mount components are really tricky to solder on....

[dje]

Thank you Roy,
Hi Dave, yes a completely new system, self build from scratch.

Pat.

6th gen i5, something like the 6500 or the 6600 ?

[Simon Garrett]

The main difference between i5 and i7 is that i5 can run 4 execution threads in parallel and the i7 can run 8. For applications that can fully exploit multi-threading, then an i7 can be almost twice as fast as an i5 of similar technology. But neither Lightroom nor Photoshop make extensive use of multi-threading.

In terms of single-core speed, the latest Skylake i7-6700 is similar speed to the i5-6600, and I would expect Lightroom and Photoshop to have similar performance for most tasks. (But note: I haven't any direct experience, this is just my guess.)

The more recent architectures (Skylake and even Haswell) are more powerful than some of the older ones; they achieve more with the same raw speed. I would choose a modern i5 (for example i5-6600) over an older i7. As an example, my i7-6700K processor is about twice the raw processor speed of my previous 6-year-old Bloomfield i7-930, but rendering images in Lightroom the newer processor is over 5 times faster.

[george013]

I didn't see this link yet. http://ark.intel.com/
You can select different processors and compare them.

George

[SamRothstein]

Just to throw this out there, I'm currently editing using a 5 year old, first gen i5 2500, with 8GB of ram and 1GB Radeon 5570 GPU, on an older 830 series Samsung SSD running Win 7. No problems running Photoshop Elements 14, any of the free softwares like RawTherapee, and usually with Chrome running on a second desktop looking at tutorials. No complaints about performance. If I had another $600-$700 to throw away, I might look at upgrading, but there's no need honestly.

[Simon Garrett]

Just to throw this out there, I'm currently editing using a 5 year old, first gen i5 2500, with 8GB of ram and 1GB Radeon 5570 GPU, on an older 830 series Samsung SSD running Win 7. No problems running Photoshop Elements 14, any of the free softwares like RawTherapee, and usually with Chrome running on a second desktop looking at tutorials. No complaints about performance. If I had another $600-$700 to throw away, I might look at upgrading, but there's no need honestly.

I'd agree. It's sometimes said that most people except gear heards don't really benefit in productivity from much less than a 2:1 increase in performance. Sandy Bridge (including i5-2500) to Skylake (e.g. i5-6600 or i7-6700) will give typically a 30% improvement in single core performance for most tasks (according to the Anandtech benchmarks I've just looked up).

If you use a real cpu-hog like Lightroom then it might make a difference.