Computer tech questions about processing power needed

[ToiletDuck]

I've been gathering data to make a few big purchases, or rentals (depends on what I can find) because I have a few big work trips this year. I'll be in France for 10 days, England for two weeks, and Africa for 3 weeks/month.

Right now I'm settling on a two camera system. The Sony RX100 VI (or VII if it's out by then) for the Europe trip and probably the Sony A7RIII and RX100 VI for the big Africa trip. Again I'll more than likely just rent unless the cost of renting vs owning is narrowed because of how long the trip is (I don't mind buying used).

As far as dealing with the larger file sizes (compressed RAW Sony files of 41MB) what kind of processing power am I looking at? Can any modern day laptop handle it fine? I currently have the Hauwei Matebook X pro basic model. It has the intel i5-8250U which is a lower power 4 core/8thread cpu and 8GB ram. I was going to use Lightroom to tweak the photos.

Will this be capable of handling the photos? I have a second laptop that's much more powerful with a 6 core/12 thread cpu and RTX 2070 desktop GPU (not the max-q) but it's a 17" desktop replacement that I love using except it's not exactly Africa level portable and the screen is at 1080p resolution which has been great so far but not sure how that would work with photo editing.

There's also the issue of storage. Is there any problem with using a regular external HD or does it need to be something with more "Umph" in it? I ask because I have a 2TB external portable laptop drive sitting here that's the size of a few credit cards and I can carry anywhere.

I haven't messed with any real photography in ages and just wondering what kind of storage/computer power I need to handle the files.

 

[Gerry Winterbourne]

I've been gathering data to make a few big purchases, or rentals (depends on what I can find) because I have a few big work trips this year. I'll be in France for 10 days, England for two weeks, and Africa for 3 weeks/month.

Right now I'm settling on a two camera system. The Sony RX100 VI (or VII if it's out by then) for the Europe trip and probably the Sony A7RIII and RX100 VI for the big Africa trip. Again I'll more than likely just rent unless the cost of renting vs owning is narrowed because of how long the trip is (I don't mind buying used).

As far as dealing with the larger file sizes (compressed RAW Sony files of 41MB) what kind of processing power am I looking at? Can any modern day laptop handle it fine? I currently have the Hauwei Matebook X pro basic model. It has the intel i5-8250U which is a lower power 4 core/8thread cpu and 8GB ram. I was going to use Lightroom to tweak the photos.

You say you plan to use Lightroom - then look at the Adobe website and it will tell you what power you need.

Will this be capable of handling the photos? I have a second laptop that's much more powerful with a 6 core/12 thread cpu and RTX 2070 desktop GPU (not the max-q) but it's a 17" desktop replacement that I love using except it's not exactly Africa level portable and the screen is at 1080p resolution which has been great so far but not sure how that would work with photo editing.

There's also the issue of storage. Is there any problem with using a regular external HD or does it need to be something with more "Umph" in it? I ask because I have a 2TB external portable laptop drive sitting here that's the size of a few credit cards and I can carry anywhere.

I haven't messed with any real photography in ages and just wondering what kind of storage/computer power I need to handle the files.

 

[ToiletDuck]

You say you plan to use Lightroom - then look at the Adobe website and it will tell you what power you need.

What a douche response.

Yea why don't I just go grab a min spec system that's going to crash or make life a living hell taking hours to do what could take minutes. I asked in a practical sense. It'd be pretty fair to assume that any computer produced today meets min specs but there's a difference between being able to boot a program and actually using it effectively.

 

[Mark S Abeln]

Today's operating systems are pretty good: they will work even if severely underpowered, albeit slowly. So it comes down to how much patience you have. I've successfully edited digital images on a one gigabyte, one gigahertz processor: it's slow but it still works.

I would definitely check how much free disk space you have, determine the average file size of your photographs, and see if the free space will be adequate compared to the number of photos you plan on taking. But be sure to leave some free space on the drive, maybe 10%? By all means, be sure to take along an external drive for backups.

I find that about 8 GB RAM is adequate for Lightroom, at least as long as nothing much else is running at the time. If you are like me, and have your web browser open with a lot of tabs, or maybe use Photoshop, then 12 GB or 16 GB should work well.

Multiple cores and a fast GPU aren't of too much utility in editing still images, and a fast single core speed with adequate memory still usually "wins" in image editing.

But even if you have a fast CPU, GPU, and lots of memory, you'll still get a performance slowdown if the hard drive is slow. I couldn't find the specs on the drive on the manufacturer's website. However, even if it is slow, it is the best kind of slow: slow when you don't really need the performance, such as when you are booting the computer, uploading images to the computer, and when loading an image for editing. The most intolerable slowness is when you are interactively editing images, but I think you won't see this problem. Drive slowness only damages interactive performance if you have inadequate RAM, as the operating system offloads running code temporarily to the hard drive, which typically manifests itself as a severe slowdown. Lightroom specifically is designed to work well with computers that have slow hard drive access, as it builds a cache of pre-processed images.

A higher resolution monitor can be quite useful. I edited my early photos on a low resolution monitor, and I definitely was mislead in my editing, since I was unable to see nearly entire images at full resolution.

Here is some advice from Adobe about Lightroom performance:

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

I'd recommend setting up your laptop now with Lightroom, and then load a bunch of images into it, and try editing them. Evaluate it yourself!

 

[Leswick II]

You have access to Fry's and they carry bunch of stuff, plus you can get it online. Not sure you want to go this route, but I got a desktop rig and had the techies install more RAM = now have 32GB on it. It's probably over-the-top, but I don't have to worry about molasses in the system. Also, got a real nice NEC 27" monitor.....and never looked back. I'm one of those that don't edit anything in the laptop (screen quality unreliable), except I might reduce some shots for family/friends during my travel/explores.

My Lenovo laptop (15") needs upgrade, but I recently added more RAM (now have 12GB) so I'm probably good for another 10yrs ? :-D Anyway, I feel no hesitation in anything I do. I always saw 17" laptops as furniture.

As to external HD, you can probably get them from Costco, as well. I've been going to AK quite a bit and always take two 1TB type with me....making sure the copies are repetitive. You may want bigger ?

Enjoy your travels.

 

[rochester21]

Those ULV cpus don't really scream power, but they do the job. The only potential bottleneck would be a mechanical drive, but i am assuming you're using a ssd(preferably a larger, quality one).

In which case you're good to go.

 

[Mystery member]

I've been gathering data to make a few big purchases, or rentals (depends on what I can find) because I have a few big work trips this year. I'll be in France for 10 days, England for two weeks, and Africa for 3 weeks/month.

Right now I'm settling on a two camera system. The Sony RX100 VI (or VII if it's out by then) for the Europe trip and probably the Sony A7RIII and RX100 VI for the big Africa trip. Again I'll more than likely just rent unless the cost of renting vs owning is narrowed because of how long the trip is (I don't mind buying used).

As far as dealing with the larger file sizes (compressed RAW Sony files of 41MB) what kind of processing power am I looking at? Can any modern day laptop handle it fine? I currently have the Hauwei Matebook X pro basic model. It has the intel i5-8250U which is a lower power 4 core/8thread cpu and 8GB ram. I was going to use Lightroom to tweak the photos.

I've travelled with significantly lower spec. hardware with no problems, but noting that I only do JPEG tweaking on the road. There's really too little time for anything else when travelling, and I've mainly used the laptop for storage and emailing of resized images.

I've used a 1Tb external HDD for backup, as well as having enough SD cards so that I don't need to recycle them. It will be easy to calculate your storage requirements. Even if you shoot JPEG + RAW, storage is hardly ever a problem.

I've used a 2GHz Celeron with 2G RAM, an AMD A4 1.5GHz with 4G RAM, and lately, an iPad with 128Gb of storage. No separate backup for the latter, apart from the SD cards.

Will this be capable of handling the photos? I have a second laptop that's much more powerful with a 6 core/12 thread cpu...

Threads don't matter for LR.

There's also the issue of storage. Is there any problem with using a regular external HD or does it need to be something with more "Umph" in it? I ask because I have a 2TB external portable laptop drive sitting here that's the size of a few credit cards and I can carry anywhere.

I haven't messed with any real photography in ages and just wondering what kind of storage/computer power I need to handle the files.

The computer stuff is easy, and I'd be more concerned about getting familiar with the cameras. Sonys are very capable but can be complex.

Have you looked at the cost of Sony lenses?

 

[bjn70]

I use a 10 year old laptop with core 2 duo processor- 2 cores at 2.5 GHz. It does just fine with 36mp files, and I can stitch 3 of them together with no problem. My machine is running Windows 10 32bit which will only address 4GB of RAM. This is my real limitation- only a few image processing programs seem able to run under 32 bit OS. I think my laptop will be a good machine for a long time but I'm counting the days until I have to upgrade just to get 64 bit OS.

 

[davidedric]

Good response Mark, especially after the OP's snotty response to Gerry's suggestion. Only comment is that I would want 20% free space on the disk.

Dave

 

[davidedric]

You say you plan to use Lightroom - then look at the Adobe website and it will tell you what power you need.

What a douche response.

Yea why don't I just go grab a min spec system that's going to crash or make life a living hell taking hours to do what could take minutes. I asked in a practical sense. It'd be pretty fair to assume that any computer produced today meets min specs but there's a difference between being able to boot a program and actually using it effectively.

Hey, why don't you follow Mark's link below. You might actually learn something. Dave

 

[LordKOTL]

I've been gathering data to make a few big purchases, or rentals (depends on what I can find) because I have a few big work trips this year. I'll be in France for 10 days, England for two weeks, and Africa for 3 weeks/month.

Right now I'm settling on a two camera system. The Sony RX100 VI (or VII if it's out by then) for the Europe trip and probably the Sony A7RIII and RX100 VI for the big Africa trip. Again I'll more than likely just rent unless the cost of renting vs owning is narrowed because of how long the trip is (I don't mind buying used).

As far as dealing with the larger file sizes (compressed RAW Sony files of 41MB) what kind of processing power am I looking at? Can any modern day laptop handle it fine? I currently have the Hauwei Matebook X pro basic model. It has the intel i5-8250U which is a lower power 4 core/8thread cpu and 8GB ram. I was going to use Lightroom to tweak the photos.

Will this be capable of handling the photos? I have a second laptop that's much more powerful with a 6 core/12 thread cpu and RTX 2070 desktop GPU (not the max-q) but it's a 17" desktop replacement that I love using except it's not exactly Africa level portable and the screen is at 1080p resolution which has been great so far but not sure how that would work with photo editing.

There's also the issue of storage. Is there any problem with using a regular external HD or does it need to be something with more "Umph" in it? I ask because I have a 2TB external portable laptop drive sitting here that's the size of a few credit cards and I can carry anywhere.

I haven't messed with any real photography in ages and just wondering what kind of storage/computer power I need to handle the files.

I've done travel editing with a Surface Pro 1, and now I use a Surface Book 2. While I don't use Adobe, I can say that in general as long as you meet the minimum requirements for ram/processor it will work but It might be slow. Not as painful as trying to upload 2-300 RAW files over a hotel wifi connection to cloud storage (don't ask), but it might be slow enough that it could irritate you.

Better spec = faster. My D750 has ~30MB RAWs and both the surface pro 1 and surface book 2 could handle them with Nikon's own software, and Capture NX-D can drag a system. My opinion is if you have the Huawei already, run a test on it to see if it's painfully slow or passable.

For storage my recommendation is to either go SSD or good, reputable thumbdrive (I've had awesome luck with an older 128GB samsung bar or a USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 SSD case containing a 2.5" SSD). While it may be tempting to re-use a platter HDD, they tend to be more fragile and of course slower. If you're sold on the 2TB laptop external, by all means. I'd use use it primarily for backup rather than a working drive since it will be slow. The connection will also be something to consider. USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 will be your fastest bet. USB 3 should still be usable. Anything slower and you might be waiting awhile.

I hope this helps a bit. Good luck.

 

[rochester21]

My machine is running Windows 10 32bit which will only address 4GB of RAM. This is my real limitation- only a few image processing programs seem able to run under 32 bit OS. I think my laptop will be a good machine for a long time but I'm counting the days until I have to upgrade just to get 64 bit OS.

Getting 64 bit OS is easy, but why W10? Especially on a C2D era laptop. W7(no service pack) needs 800mb to run, with everything installed 2 gb ram is enough. I used to do light editing on 1.6 ghz dual core, 1.5gb ddr2 667mhz ram. It wasn't fast, but... Neither is my third gen i5 with 6gb 1600 mhz ddr3. An ssd would help, but i can't trust flash memory.

I'm never erasing Windows 7 from my home computer, especially since i'm using decade old software on it, like Corel Photoimpact.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Say hello to the NSA for me next time you turn on W10. You can almost feel that thing spying on you. Just open a resource monitor and watch the OS doing stuff in the background while the computer is idle and nothing runs... Except the OS. And you're like: "Windows 10, why U using computer more than me??". Of course, even windows XP+Vista used to do this, background processes etc, but not like W10. That thing is alive, it watches you.

 

[thinkinginimages]

I've been gathering data to make a few big purchases, or rentals (depends on what I can find) because I have a few big work trips this year. I'll be in France for 10 days, England for two weeks, and Africa for 3 weeks/month.

Right now I'm settling on a two camera system. The Sony RX100 VI (or VII if it's out by then) for the Europe trip and probably the Sony A7RIII and RX100 VI for the big Africa trip. Again I'll more than likely just rent unless the cost of renting vs owning is narrowed because of how long the trip is (I don't mind buying used).

As far as dealing with the larger file sizes (compressed RAW Sony files of 41MB) what kind of processing power am I looking at? Can any modern day laptop handle it fine? I currently have the Hauwei Matebook X pro basic model. It has the intel i5-8250U which is a lower power 4 core/8thread cpu and 8GB ram. I was going to use Lightroom to tweak the photos.

Will this be capable of handling the photos? I have a second laptop that's much more powerful with a 6 core/12 thread cpu and RTX 2070 desktop GPU (not the max-q) but it's a 17" desktop replacement that I love using except it's not exactly Africa level portable and the screen is at 1080p resolution which has been great so far but not sure how that would work with photo editing.

There's also the issue of storage. Is there any problem with using a regular external HD or does it need to be something with more "Umph" in it? I ask because I have a 2TB external portable laptop drive sitting here that's the size of a few credit cards and I can carry anywhere.

I haven't messed with any real photography in ages and just wondering what kind of storage/computer power I need to handle the files.

You'll be fine with the Matebook. Set the Raw cache in LR to about 10gb. The trick is free space on the internal drive. You want a good amount.

If you need to free space, use the Export as Catalog function in LR. This will create a duplicate catalog on the external of older images, complete with all data. Once you're sure it's on the external, you can delete the internal copies. LR allows you have as many catalogs as you need, and you can import and export them.

 

[edispics]

 

[Mark S Abeln]

I prefer Linux for most everything that I can do with it. Not Photoshop, obviously, and I use my Mac for that, but I probably could get by with just Linux if I had to.

But who's saying that even Linux is immune from spying? First, who knows what's in the firmware of the computers, no matter what operating system, and as Linux is open source, there's no saying what kind of mischief a very clever agency can include in the code, in plain sight.

 

[NeilMB]

If you already have the computer, why not download some of the big Sony raw files from DPReview or other places online and try editing them to find out how you like the experience?

 

[Mark S Abeln]

If you already have the computer, why not download some of the big Sony raw files from DPReview or other places online and try editing them to find out how you like the experience?

I've done that with my largish Nikon NEFs. It's not a matter of whether or not it is possible or fast enough—I do have powerful enough computers—but Photoshop is fast and functional and easy to use, and it does nearly everything I want.

I do like RawTherapee and some other free/open source software, but Gimp isn't quite up to my standards for pixel editing.

 

[NeilMB]

Sorry, I was trying to respond to the OP's question of "I currently have the Hauwei Matebook X pro basic model...Will this be capable of handling the photos?" I think that perhaps I hit the wrong "reply" button to your post about Linux. I don't think that Linux photo editing software is relevant to the OP's thread.

If you already have the computer, why not download some of the big Sony raw files from DPReview or other places online and try editing them to find out how you like the experience?

I've done that with my largish Nikon NEFs. It's not a matter of whether or not it is possible or fast enough—I do have powerful enough computers—but Photoshop is fast and functional and easy to use, and it does nearly everything I want.

I do like RawTherapee and some other free/open source software, but Gimp isn't quite up to my standards for pixel editing.

 

[DJ Photo]

the i5 and the normal 2tb external are fine