Monday April 6
 
16:29
 
PC Upgrade – Part 1

I’ve been very happy with the 26,000 yen PC I built at the end of last year except for one thing: Lightroom. It runs like a dog. A lame dog. A lame dog that hasn’t been fed for a month.

Everything else runs perfectly – even iTunes is as ok as you can expect from iTunes! – but not Lightroom. It’s just too slow and clunky.

It’s probably something to do with my 120GB+ photo library and the fact that most of my photos now are RAW, but that’s not the whole story. Lightroom was useable on my Mac with a comparable load. On my PC it isn’t.

So yesterday I decided to upgrade – I bought a Phenom II X4 920 (2.8GHz x 4) CPU and two 1TB hard drives to set up as RAID 0. With CPU and hard disk upgrade, I should get much better speed.

PassMark CPU Mark
5200+ X2 (2.7Ghz x 2): 1,280
920 X4 (2.8Ghz x 4): 3,285
i7 920 (2.67GHz x 4 x 2): 5,456

On the processor alone that’s a 2 1/2 times speed up from my current setup for 19,000 yen. Yes, the i7 would be faster, but I’d need to invest around 90,000 yen on a new motherboard, graphics card, and memory. I’d rather wait for the moment. The new processor brings the cost of my PC to 45,000 yen – 39,000 yen if I take out the cost of the old processor (I’m not including the price of the hard drives in these figures).

I did a quick test in Lightroom before and after installing the new processor, without installing the hard drives. Exporting 43 RAW files to 500 pixel JPEGs took 3m 45s with the old processor and 1m 27s with the new – which is almost exactly 2 1/2 times quicker. Nice.

Recalculating my Vista Experience Index score, I got a bit of a surprise. Not only did the processor rating go up, but graphics performance also went up! Once again, this score puzzles me. Not sure why the score for graphics should change because I thought that was all handled by the GPU. Maybe it’s related to the BIOS upgrade I did? Or maybe not everything is done by the GPU.

Processor: Old 5.2 New 5.9
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB: 5.9 (No change)
Graphics – ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics: Old 3.5 New 4.1
Gaming graphics – 3323 MB total available graphics memory: Old 3.6 New 4.0
Primary hard disk: 5.4 (No change)

Hopefully when I’ve added RAID 0 for the photo storage I’ll get even better results from the Lightroom test – Lightroom is very disk intensive. I’ll post the results in part 2.