Upgrading PC for photography.

The Darkroom

I have a packard bell slimline tower I bought this year with AMD A4-5000 processer, Nvidia geforce GT620 graphics card, 1TB Hardrive, 6GB DDR3 memory, DVD super multi drive, Card reader and integrated wireless lan and bluetooth.

I am looking to upgrade to bigger memory for use with lightroom and photoshop but what are my options with a slim line PC like the above? one person in maplins told me I'd be better off getting a new and more powerful processer and that ram isn't necessarily the problem. What says you? would you agree with that assessment? I mean if I'm buying a new processor I might as well buy a new computer no?

Thanks for the advice.

ED E

That CPU is weaker that what I have in my tablet. Whats the model number? You might be able to upgrade the CPU without buying a whole new machine.

The Darkroom

ED E wrote: »

That CPU is weaker that what I have in my tablet. Whats the model number? You might be able to upgrade the CPU without buying a whole new machine.

Thanks ED, unfortunately I'm too new a member to post a direct link to the PC but the number is Imedia S2185 and if you google that you'll get it no probs.

Looks like the max capacity of RAM it can take so far is 8GB which would be fine by me, I guess seeing as you mentioned the CPU is what you have on your tablet that this is definitely what needs upgrading. I mean the CPU finds it hard to handle Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop and when I open task manager its consuming enormous amounts of CPU and using it to the max. would be nice if you could advise on another processor. thanks for the help.

ED E

Cant see any variants with high end AMD CPUs. Theres a strong intel variant but that'd have a completely different motherboard. No way to know if it supports anything else.

If you're going to be doing any kind of volume of processing, which if you're using lightroom Im guessing you are, you're gonna want to go and get something a lot more meaty.

The Darkroom

ED E wrote: »

Cant see any variants with high end AMD CPUs. Theres a strong intel variant but that'd have a completely different motherboard. No way to know if it supports anything else.

If you're going to be doing any kind of volume of processing, which if you're using lightroom Im guessing you are, you're gonna want to go and get something a lot more meaty.

so when processing photographs its more important to have a good processor than plenty of RAM? will upgrading the extra 2GB of Ram ( taking it to a total of 8GB ) make an improvement at all do ya think or is it money wasted?

ED E

Depends. Shooting RAW at large resolutions makes use of RAM, as does opening a dozen files/projects simultaneously. CPU is what counts when opening the file in the first place, applying filters/resizing/adjustments etc.

TBH even with loads of RAM the CPU is your bottleneck, you might notice a *tiny* speed bump from those 2GB but I doubt it.