Look­ing to speed up  Light­room 3?  In my last arti­cle, Speed Up Light­room 3, I talked about set­ting up pref­er­ences in Light­room 3 to increase per­for­mance and adding a few small upgrades to help speed things up.   But, some­times, your com­puter may be too old to make a dif­fer­ence. you may need a major upgrade or a new computer.

I recently upgraded my own com­puter and saw sig­nif­i­cant Light­room 3 speed increases. Well, it’s basi­cally a brand-new PC at this point. My old com­puter had a Giga­byte brand moth­er­board with the Pen­tium D dual core proces­sor 2.8 GHz proces­sor with 4 GB of mem­ory. Here is a list of the com­po­nents I used to build my new PC:

Case – Cooler Mas­ter Haf 912 with three addi­tional optional fans. Five fans total. Why so many fans? Heat can kill a com­puter or at least slows it down. A cool PC is a happy PC.

Power Sup­ply – Antec 520 Watt high cur­rent power supply.

Moth­er­board – Giga­byte brand model Z68X-Ud3-B3 dis­con­tin­ued. (Update Decem­ber 2011 new gen­er­a­tion moth­er­board Giga­byte brand model GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3) This is my third Giga­byte brand moth­er­board I have installed in my com­put­ers. I just install them and they work.

• LGA1155 CPU Socket
• Intel^® Z68 Express Chipset
• 4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sock­ets sup­port­ing up to 32 GB
• 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors
• 4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors
• Up to 14 USB 2.0  ports 8 external
• Up to 4 USB 3.0  ports 2 external
• ATX Form Fac­tor; 30.5cm x 24.4cm
• 6 x audio jacks
• Up to 2 IEEE 1394 port 1 external

CPU – Intel Core I7 2600k 4 core / 8-Way Mul­ti­task proces­sor. Unlocked 3.4 GHz and 3.7 GHz in turbo mode. This proces­sor and moth­er­board com­bi­na­tion can be over clocked but it is not nec­es­sary at this time.

Mem­ory – 2–Gskill, 4GB, 2 chan­nel DDR3 1600 mem­ory mod­ules for a total of 8 GB.

I used my old hard drive. Sea­gate 1TB

I also used my old video card – EVGA GeForce 9500 GT 512MB video card. New ver­sion EVGA GeForce GT 430 1GB

Oper­at­ing Sys­tem – Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional.

Upgrad­ing the PC to this new con­fig­u­ra­tion has dra­mat­i­cally improved my per­for­mance when using a pro­gram like Light­room 3. Just start­ing up Light­room would take approx­i­mately 60 sec­onds and now it only takes 3 sec­onds. Other Pro­grams like Pho­tomatix Pro, an HDR plug-in for Light­room used to take 5 to 6 min­utes to process, now takes less than a minute. Another pro­gram I use is Proshow Gold, a slide show pre­sen­ta­tion pro­gram, also saw dra­matic improvement.

Win­dows 7 is a real improve­ment over Win­dows XP. I chose Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional because it has a Win­dows XP emu­la­tion mode that allows me to run older soft­ware that is only com­pat­i­ble with Win­dows XP.

Con­clu­sion

Upgrad­ing this com­puter was well worth the expense of about $700 to $800. You may not want to build a com­puter your­self, but if you’re look­ing to pur­chase a new com­puter you can use the spec­i­fi­ca­tions here to give you a guide on what to look in spec­i­fi­ca­tions. I hope this arti­cle helps you in your pho­tog­ra­phy edit­ing and improves your Light­room experience.

In a future arti­cle I will dis­cuss drive man­age­ment — how to pro­tect your pho­tos and data.

Places to buy com­puter and com­puter parts

Newegg

Com­pusa

Learn more about Light­room 3