A field report after upgrading my Lightroom PC to the brand new CPU Ryzen 3900X, a beast of a CPU featuring 12 cores and 24 thread. Let’s compare the configurations:
- Old configuration: Ryzen 1700X (8 cores, 16 threads), 32 GB RAM, 1 M2. NVM SSD, 1 SATA SSD
- New configuration: Ryzen 3900X (12 cores, 24 threads), 64 GB RAM, 2 M2. NVM SSds
The performance gain is very noticable! On the old PC I often faced brief delays when scrolling through a heap of pictures. The delay was always very short (< 1 sec) but it was very annoying and destroyed the fast workflow. My wife even started using Photomechanic for doing a preselection as PM is very fast.
On the new PC all delays are gone and the import is blazingly fast. I tested 100 RAW files (Nikon Z7, about 56 MB per file) and the import was done in 2 minutes 26 seconds – including rendering 1:1 previews.
Why fast M.2 PCIe SSDs? Of course the difference to regular SATA SSDs isnt noticable during daily routine, but the surcharge for M.2 PCIe is getting cheaper every day and there are big performance gains during backup or copying large files.
Why 64 GB RAM? Currently RAM is extremly cheap and RAM that isn’t used by Lightroom will be used by Windows for caching.
What graphics adapter? In my experience this doesn’t matter much. Performance gains are minimal and from time to time this LR feature isnt very stable.
