Is a dual core enough for lightroom/PS?

Ksanti · 21 Mar 2012 at 23:12

I'm looking at replacing my laptop to get something I can process images on and I'm coming down to either a Dell XPS 15, XPS 15z or Vaio F series. The XPS 15z looks pretty nice (the XPS 15 and Vaio F are very bulky which isn't a dealbreaker but it is a negative), especially with the RGB display, but I'm concerned about the performance in lightroom and photoshop?

My benchmark is my i7 920 @ 3.4gHz/6Gb RAM/7k2rpm hdd and I'd like my laptop to hopefully match the performance or be able to run with it. I do some pretty hectic editing sometimes rather than just running stuff through lightroom which is what worries me.

Anybody use a dual core here and can give a description of performance? For reference the 15z I'd get would have an i7 2640M in it.

Buchanan0204 · 21 Mar 2012 at 23:16

It will be fine. It's not automatically going to crash because it's not a quad core. You may just find yourself waiting a little longer than you would on a desktop i7.

theheyes · 21 Mar 2012 at 23:34

I went from a Q6600 to a Core i3, which according to the benchmarks would perform similarly, and subjectively I would say that is true. Anandtech have a pretty good CPU comparison feature on their site so it might be worth you having a look at their benchmarks.

Ksanti · 21 Mar 2012 at 23:38

Buchanan0204 said:
It will be fine. It's not automatically going to crash because it's not a quad core. You may just find yourself waiting a little longer than you would on a desktop i7.

Yeah but in terms of futureproofing I don't want anything substantially slower than my desktop i7 - the i2670QM chip that's in the XPS 15 and Vaio F is meant to outperform my 920 so being slower is a potential problem depending on how much slower it is.

ShakenNstirred · 22 Mar 2012 at 06:24

both programs running fine on my dualcore laptop

Hodders · 22 Mar 2012 at 09:19

I would take dual core and 8GB ram over quad core and 4gb ram.

neil_g · 22 Mar 2012 at 15:49

Hodders said:
I would take dual core and 8GB ram over quad core and 4gb ram.

really? working with high ISO 5Dmk2 files my old Q9550 was struggling even with 8GB memory.

i5aces · 22 Mar 2012 at 15:50

i run lightroom and photoshop cs5 on my laptop dual core @ 2.6ghz and 4 gb ram,
never had a problem, and dosent seem to take to long to do stuff, sometimes there is a slight delay but not very often.
only once have i had photoshop come up with a error because i tried to do a massive content aware fill and it said i didnt have enough ram

Biggus · 26 Mar 2012 at 02:44

Hodders said:
I would take dual core and 8GB ram over quad core and 4gb ram.

You could always add more RAM later as finances allow, which would be the easier and cheaper option

Photogaz · 1 Apr 2012 at 00:32

I think quad core is a must nowadays for any photographer that uses high res files and does a lot of processing.

The_Abyss · 2 Apr 2012 at 22:55

Lightroom and Photoshop will be treated differently. Photoshop CS5 (unsure about 4) can pass many processes off to the graphics card, Lightroom 4, which I've just installed, frustratingly still refuses too meaning I do benefit from a quad core instead.

feriso · 3 Apr 2012 at 01:03

It'd be nice if aperture did that. Maybe in #4

Gfx offload I mean