New processing rig? Threadripper?

-TA- · 29 Aug 2017 at 17:50

Hi all, put this thread in the photo section as the new build is solely for processing.

My current rig is on its last legs, being worked to death! Been having odd performance issues, and not booting, even had to pull my fairly tame overclock way back, so think its time to upgrade!

Last 2 builds have been OCUK pre-overclocked bundles and worked well, wife's PC puts my current rig to shame (exports 4x as fast!)

So then is the Threadripper worth looking at? For pure photo processing power, combined with a GPU that actually works with Lightroom, looking for any advice on best current build I should look at, CPU/MOBO/RAM/GPU combo (m.2 ssd for windows is a given)

Thanks

adrichardson81 · 3 Sep 2017 at 17:03

Personally I went with Ryzen. It still gives you 16 threads to throw at editing and is a lot cheaper. The only reasons to go Threadripper are if you think you need more than 16 threads, extra PCIE lanes (you almost certainly won't, unless you're talking 3 cards in SLI/CF), or quad channel ddr4 (again, I don't think you'll notice the difference).

Holst1981 · 3 Sep 2017 at 22:07

Will lightroom now take advantage of 16 threads?

I'm still on version 5 and it's very dependent on the fastest core.

adrichardson81 · 4 Sep 2017 at 23:28

Lightroom CC felt a lot more snappy, but I've not done any serious tests as I do most of my raw editing in DXO 11 (which loves it!)

An Exception · 5 Sep 2017 at 08:30

Personally I think more cores is only really going to help with boosting render previews and export times.. and working on the pictures while rendering.
I'm not sure exactly how many threads lightroom uses these days as I haven't upgraded past a 6700k.
However if I was buying today.. I'd get a threadripper and disable hyperthreading. From seeing old benchmarks.. LR was faster on i5 over i7.
So 16 cores and 16 threads would probably be very fast.

D.P. · 5 Sep 2017 at 16:02

the cores will be used for exports and previews, not obvious it will make a difference for editing. Faster cores are more important for that.

I would like to know how threadripper does for LR though. I am liekly buying a threadripper setup for some professional work (we have a lot fo number crunching and things can get parallelized easily).

Raymond Lin · 5 Sep 2017 at 16:57

The only time LR maxes out my CPU is when i am exporting.

An Exception · 7 Sep 2017 at 15:11

When you have more than 4 cores.. I think lightroom should dedicate the additional cores to rendering 1:1 previews. That way you don't have to wait hours for 1:1 previews to be generated for 3000+ pictures. Something like a 16 core threadripper should allow for previews to be built as fast as you can scroll through the images during the culling process.
Right now I load the images and render overnight.. it's a pita if I forget to pre-render over night when I come to work on them.

D.P. · 7 Sep 2017 at 15:19

An Exception said:
When you have more than 4 cores.. I think lightroom should dedicate the additional cores to rendering 1:1 previews. That way you don't have to wait hours for 1:1 previews to be generated for 3000+ pictures. Something like a 16 core threadripper should allow for previews to be built as fast as you can scroll through the images during the culling process.
Right now I load the images and render overnight.. it's a pita if I forget to pre-render over night when I come to work on them.

I'm pretty sure LR already uses all aailable cores for rendering the previews. What is=t doesn't do is use mutliple cores to render a single image, because of segmentation issues make this far harder and the performance would never scale well. Rendering separate previews on separate cores is a few lines of code in comparison.

Also, LR uses full SSE vectored instructions. So even if you are only using a single core, for any operation that can be parallelized it will already be running 16 pixels per operation.