Faster GPU or CPU for photo editing: Retouching Forum: Digital Photography Review (2024)

jfriend00 wrote:

sirhawkeye64 wrote:

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jfriend00 wrote:

sirhawkeye64 wrote:

Second thing is that the newer laptop has a newer style secondary storage connector, but I'm finding that it's so new that viable options to fill the storage slot at this time is rather rare, and the ones that are available are generally not brands that I recognize (and seem to be limitied to 1TB or less, which poses a second problem of storage, as I would probably eat through the remaining storage within 1-2 years after I load my current photo library).

What is the newer style secondary storage connector? Are you talking about something internal (some kind of M.2/NVME) or is this an external connector (like Thunderbolt)?

It's an internal m.2 SaTA (NVME) gen 4 connector, but the catch is its a 2242 style drive (so it's shorter than your typical 2280 which is most common). There "are" options for it, but most are off brands I don't recognize except Sabrient. But then there's the cost. A 1TB 2242 or 2450 drive costs 2x as much as a regular 2280 style drive. Lenovo wants $225 for a 1TB Drive.

Which are you looking for M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME? Some slots can take either. I was just looking into short M2. SATA drives for a Raspberry Pi and found a number of quite reasonably priced ones.

If it's NVME, then there seem to various choices (mostly from brands I'm not that familiar with):

Sabrent Rocket , $129

Kingspec , $109

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Dogfish , $108

Robob , $109

There are SATA variations for about $20 less (and less speed).

I'm going to guess it's NVME due to the age, but I am not going to buy this laptop after all (very poor sRGB support on the display, so to me, that was enough to not bother -- my SP7 has about 90%+ coverage, the laptop in question was like 50% and my monitor at home is somewhere around 90-95% of sRGB).

The problem was the aside from Sabrient, I didn't recognize the other brands and I would want to know what memory brand they were using. Some are just re-badged Micron drives, which would be fine.

Either way, the spec sheet said max of 1TB which may not even be enough, so I need to find one that supports the larger 2280 drives and 2TB (I would go through 1TB pretty quick -- probably within 1-2 years, and my goal with getting a laptop was to not have to use an external SSD anymore except for backups).

I did manage to find a 4GB AMD RX 6400 for about $130-$140 or so and I think that will be fine, as it was only marginally slower than the video card that would be in the laptop I was looking at. The CPU in the laptop was only about 25% faster than the one in my desktop anyway so I'm not missing out on much, other than moving everything to one single device that is portable and doing away with external drives for now.

I'm actually a little glad I didn't get the laptop in the end though as I was playing around with my friend's new Asus ProArt laptop and that's probably what I'd like to get in a year as you can expand the storage (I believe it can support up to 4TB of storage across 2 NVMEs, at least based on what you can get currently as mainstream, which is 1 and 2TB drives mostly. --- there are some 4TB drives but they are rather costly.

I'd rather spend a bit more later and buy a good laptop that will last me several years than cheap out on an $800 one and need to upgrade again in 2-3 years.

The VC should help the desktop as it seems that's where it struggles the most. The CPU is highly rated for gaming (so should be good for LR and PS) and I have plenty of system RAM and fast internal storage.

SO... I've decided to check out a video card for my desktop instead as a cheaper alternative ($150 for an AMD RX 6400 which is a budget gaming Gpu but should help out with some of the issues -- mainly using a lot of AI masks in LR I found, as I had two crashes yesterday simply because the CPU graphics was not good enough).

It shouldn't crash because the iGPU isn't powerful enough (that would just make it slow). The crash would be caused by something else - perhaps running out of memory or maybe overheating.

Not sure exactly, but it didn't run out of memory or overheating as it was just limited to LRC. Everything else was fine. Luckily I didn't lose any work (keep the XMP File option turned off for this very reason... crashes). And that was not the cause either. I was multi-tasking though so perhaps some shared resource (not sure what) maybe got overwhelmed. but all of my devices are modern (ie. my external SSD is a USB-C 3.2 drive, as is the port i'ts plugged into, etc). All I remember is I was creating a bunch of AI masks, waited about 2 minutes for it to complete, went browsing in the library module for another few minutes, and started to edit another photo. Between swapping from one photo to the next is when it crashed... the disk resource level was basically zero so not sure why it crashed (I haven't checked the logs yet and probably won't bother). I did notice it was using about 3GB of video memory (512MB on the iGPu and 3 GB of shared memory but still had some 16 GB free).

When doing a resource challenged task, probably best not to multi-task while waiting for completion as that just pulls into use more memory. It's unclear if that was a resource issues, a temperature issue or just a LRC bug when trying to do multiple operations at once like this. Regardless, if it's taking minutes to make a mask, you would sure benefit from some new compute hardware.

Wasn't a temp issue (I have temp monitoring. While it was running around 50 degrees C that's within normal range for the CPU, and the system case was cooller than that). Again, if it was a heat issue the entire system likely would have locked up too.

I'm gong to go with possibly a LR bug or possibly something wrong with the .Net framework as that has sometimes caused issues too. But so far, today, after doing the same things basically, no issues, so I'm not going to put too much effort into this, but the fact that it is trying to use about 3-4GB of video memory while in the library module seems a bit high. Basically it maxes out the dedicated 512MB almost immediately. It could also have been a conclict between LR and something else, although I don't think I was using anything else that would have needed the GPU, just PS was running idle in the background, and maybe a few Windows Explorer windows (And was listening to music on Windows Media Player without any on-screen display so I doubt that was it). I'm going to just assume it was a software issue or something crashed (not LR itself, but one of its supporting components like a .NET framework component). Either way, I rebotted after the crash yesterday and all was fine, and frankly, that was the only crash I've had for at least the past year or two. But I was also not playing around with the AI masks that much either until that point. Plus,I was working rather quickly, doing masking, quick edits, and then moving to the next photos so maybe LR got overwhelmed or something.