Lightroom and 4/8 cores. Does it use 8!?

[Inconsequential]

Im looking to buy a Mac Pro when the new CPUs come out (not buying now due to no funds!)

Anyway, it'll be used for CAD but mainly Lightroom.

People that use lightroom, can you look at your CPU usage for all 4/8 cores and tell me what the usage is when your importing/searching/doing whatever and if there is any point in me getting 8 instead of 4 cores (Save myself £300 and get 8gb ram vs 4Gb!)

System will be on 300Gb Velociraptor and data on a 1TB Samsung F1, so lets say IO won't be that bottlenecked...

Cheers

 

[wheezy]

I'm an Aperture User, and it doesn't use all cores; the only CPU intensive tasks are just exporting the images. More importantly you'll want as much RAM as you can buy, and the hard drives (which you're taking care of).

I use the stock ATI2600HD card and it handles the adjustments smooth and on the fly, no real delay or lag or system freeze up. With pictures, the CPU isn't as important as the GPU and RAM will be for you.

I went with an 8 Core as the Refurb was only $100 more than a new 4 Core would have been.

 

[ceres]

Im looking to buy a Mac Pro when the new CPUs come out (not buying now due to no funds!)

Anyway, it'll be used for CAD but mainly Lightroom.

People that use lightroom, can you look at your CPU usage for all 4/8 cores and tell me what the usage is when your importing/searching/doing whatever and if there is any point in me getting 8 instead of 4 cores (Save myself £300 and get 8gb ram vs 4Gb!)

System will be on 300Gb Velociraptor and data on a 1TB Samsung F1, so lets say IO won't be that bottlenecked...

Cheers

I/O is "totally" the bottleneck these days lest you are running a high speed raid or SSD setup. Strangely enough, this is even true when performing terribly mundane tasks like let´s say quickparing / unraring a large archive.
You get a lot of beachball action despite ample RAM and CPU Power because browsers and such are all trying to access small files in the cache, for example.
SSD is really set to close the gap but right now magnetic storage is the bottleneck. I don´t own Final Cut Express or even pro but I use Vegas Pro on my Vista 64 machine and HDD thrashing can get extreme. That´s one of the reasons why so many people with FC use RAID arrays. I think Apple even recommends it for HD editing.
IMHO that´s also a sector Apple should tend to: Better HW Raid.
You just cannot tap into the full potential of a dual xeon setup without adequate HDD performance.

 

[Inconsequential]

My perfect setup would be SSDs but as it would cost more than the base machine I guess im stuck with a Velociraptor being system/app/scratch and 1TB being data.

I suppose in the future when 250Gb SSDs are £100 a go I'll RAID 0 them with 1TBs as backups. But I can only dream

So the basic idea is for me to get a single proc and in the future when I need it either just upgrade the existing processor (highly likely really) or add another one (less likely!).

Sadly my 2.4Ghz/4Gb/200Gb 7200 eSATA photo library just hangs too much while sorting itself out and after a while really grates on me

Hopefully after I have enough CPU power and mem to sort this out with decent HD access speeds I'll be laughing!

 

[ceres]

My perfect setup would be SSDs but as it would cost more than the base machine I guess im stuck with a Velociraptor being system/app/scratch and 1TB being data.

I suppose in the future when 250Gb SSDs are £100 a go I'll RAID 0 them with 1TBs as backups. But I can only dream

So the basic idea is for me to get a single proc and in the future when I need it either just upgrade the existing processor (highly likely really) or add another one (less likely!).

Sadly my 2.4Ghz/4Gb/200Gb 7200 eSATA photo library just hangs too much while sorting itself out and after a while really grates on me

Hopefully after I have enough CPU power and mem to sort this out with decent HD access speeds I'll be laughing!

Well, you could try one of the inexpensive Highpoint Raid Cards such as the 150 USD RR2640. Those Samsung F1 Drives are selling for rather cheap these days, so I´d recommend such a disk setup over a 8 core system.
The quad MPi7 should be more than enough.