Franglais91
Senior Member
My D800 RAW files are about 45-50 MB each. When shooting a use a 32GB card in the camera which I occasionally fill up so I have a second in reserve.
When treating the files in Lightroom I keep the files on an external drive with an SSD disk connected to the computer via a USB3 cable to get the maximum i/o speed. There are several steps:
- First I go through all the files rating them and picking the ones I like. This often means going back and forth between images and reviewing in individual images at 100% to make sure its sharp and in focus. It is very annoying if the system is slow in doing this operation
- Then I lovingly correct the best images to correct colour balance, exposure, redo the lighting etc. I can put up with the system being a bit slow during this operation.
I actually have three systems that I use to edit my pictures in Lightroom, depending on whether I'm travelling or at home. I think that if you're just editing in Lightroom - and not doing something very complex in Photoshop with multiple layers - then 3GB of RAM is enough. I have Lightroom open at the moment with a D800 image and the program is using less than 300MB of RAM.
I think that the problem is your CPU which needs to render the image every time you click on it or make a modification.
Here is a link to the passmark table of CPU's : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
Your CPU has a Passmark of 1966. That's the same as my Surface 3 tablet (Atom Z78700). It's sluggish. Definitely not a good experience with D800 files inLIghtroom but I put up with it for short periods
My Ultrabook has an i5-4210U with a Passmark of 3383. It's better. I can put up with it.
The only system I have that I feel really comfortable with is 4 years old but it has a Core i7-2630-QM with a Passmark of 5560. That's almost three time the overall processing power of your system. The clock speed of each core is slower than yours but as it has 8 processing units which Lightroom can use the result is fast.
The only way to find out how your system performs is to try it out. It has a very fast clock speed but probably only a couple of cores.
When treating the files in Lightroom I keep the files on an external drive with an SSD disk connected to the computer via a USB3 cable to get the maximum i/o speed. There are several steps:
- First I go through all the files rating them and picking the ones I like. This often means going back and forth between images and reviewing in individual images at 100% to make sure its sharp and in focus. It is very annoying if the system is slow in doing this operation
- Then I lovingly correct the best images to correct colour balance, exposure, redo the lighting etc. I can put up with the system being a bit slow during this operation.
I actually have three systems that I use to edit my pictures in Lightroom, depending on whether I'm travelling or at home. I think that if you're just editing in Lightroom - and not doing something very complex in Photoshop with multiple layers - then 3GB of RAM is enough. I have Lightroom open at the moment with a D800 image and the program is using less than 300MB of RAM.
I think that the problem is your CPU which needs to render the image every time you click on it or make a modification.
Here is a link to the passmark table of CPU's : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
Your CPU has a Passmark of 1966. That's the same as my Surface 3 tablet (Atom Z78700). It's sluggish. Definitely not a good experience with D800 files inLIghtroom but I put up with it for short periods
My Ultrabook has an i5-4210U with a Passmark of 3383. It's better. I can put up with it.
The only system I have that I feel really comfortable with is 4 years old but it has a Core i7-2630-QM with a Passmark of 5560. That's almost three time the overall processing power of your system. The clock speed of each core is slower than yours but as it has 8 processing units which Lightroom can use the result is fast.
The only way to find out how your system performs is to try it out. It has a very fast clock speed but probably only a couple of cores.
Last edited:
