UKC

Hi

What would be the most effective way of speeding up my MacBook Pro? I want to increase the performance generally, but I guess I do hammer it most when doing batch RAW conversions and the like in Lightroom & CS6.

Currently has a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 4GB of RAM.

Would boosting the RAM by 100%, or maybe 200%, make a massive noticeable difference? Seems like the cheapest option.

Ta

In reply to siwithington:

I just did exactly what you describe but with a 2009 iMac (from 4 to 8 GB RAM) and there is a noticeable difference. It is not massive when working in Lightroom but it makes it tolerable with big RAW files.

The brief research I did implied that processor upgrade is more effective but that wasn't an option for me - I guess not for a MacBook Pro either but I'm not 100% sure.

Hope this helps.
L

In reply to LukeO:

Check the Activity Monitor app: it will tell you whether your CPU or memory is maxed out or your disk is working constantly.

If it's CPU there's nothing you can do about it, but a memory upgrade is easy.

In reply to siwithington:

Not sure exactly which MacBook my work colleague has, but he fitted a Solid State Drive (SSD) and has 8Gb of RAM in his. And he's a techy geek, so knows what he's doing...

Also, he did not buy his RAM from Apple, but from Crucial at about half the cost, as Apple rip you off seriously on that one...

Mind you, an SSD is not cheap, although they are getting a lot more reasonable now.

In reply to siwithington:

Cool, will check out the app.

You can get 16Gb of Crucial RAM for less than 70 notes - seems reasonable and can only improve things. To be honest, it ain't that bad... I just want more!!!

In reply to siwithington:

If it doesn't have an SSD currently then that is by far the biggest improvement you can make to performance for most applications.

In reply to siwithington:

I specced my PC for LR4 and HD video editing/rendering. After a fair bit of research, decided to separate OS, LR catalog and images onto different disks

OS Disk: SSD. Needs to be large enough to deal with LR storing cache for Video, which you can limit via preferences. I went for Vertex 4 240 GB.

LR Disk: SSD for catalog and image previews. I always render 1:1 and never purge, preview files currently running at 70 GB (can alter via preference). I went for Vertex 3 120 GB, should have gone bigger

Data Disk: 4 GB Hitachi.

LR Catalog backs up to Dropbox (previews don't back up), which means I can access catalog on network (with care) and remotely. Data backups to NAS (RAID 2 disk) and a 4GB USB external drive.

Processor, i7 Hex core, over-clocked to 4.2 GHz
RAM: 32 GB

In reply to siwithington:

definitely ssd. make sure you get one that's supported with trim support.

16gb ram always good too.

In reply to siwithington: Just popped a 512 gb ssd into mine and 32gb ram. Difference is light and day.

In reply to siwithington:

Ta all. SSD is an expensive upgrade!

In reply to siwithington:


And worth every single penny.

I have a SSD 120Gb for my OS and software and a couple of 1Tb drives for data and my PC boots up in seconds, not minutes.

I also enjoy playing the game where I place all my software shortcuts into the Start Folder and watch them all start running with in seconds of booting into my desktop. Try playing that game with a normal hard-drive and see how long this takes.

Only once or twice have I maxed out my 8Gb of RAM.

In reply to siwithington:

Provided you have 'enough' RAM, SSD makes a truly remarkable difference. Expensive, yes, but worth it.

I have 8G of RAM in my i7 MBP, and half a terabyte of SSD. It's scary fast.

In reply to siwithington:

Ta all. 500GB of SSD is out of budget, but perhaps I could consider going for 256 and a few hundred gig of RAW files onto external storage!

Would 4GB of RAM be 'enough' with a 256 SSD?

In reply to siwithington:
I read somewhere that after upgrading to an SSD, the RAM upgrade didn't seem to improve things a lot more.

I put a 256GB SSD in my 2009 MBpro, and the difference is day-and-night. If you never use the optical drive you can also an extra HD there.