Sodding time is the issue, once again. And a bunch of different things that keeps me busy. Basically it’s my PC that I use for editing pictures and developing photos that soaked a lot of time recently. I abandoned my AMD Phenom 965 and switched to my old Intel Q9550. Main reason for this was the overclockability of the Intel CPU. The 965 is also a fine CPU to overclock, but the only platform I could give is a AMD 770 or 790 chipset. Bummer! One can overclock with the boards I’ve got, but the CPU clock is static. And I don’t want to waste the majority of my salary for the utilities.

So, I rebuilt my PC that I usually use for work and the more serious things. It’s overclocked at 3.86GHz with an air cooler and everything looks save. Temperature and stability are within limits. And most importantly, the overall performance has increased as well. Working with Lightroom became much smoother. One of my main issues was developing with the two-monitor setup. I use one monitor for the main-view and the other one is for comparison view and cropping.

Additionally do I have to mention, I was running on Lightroom 4.0 for the last few weeks and I had performance issues on both systems, Intel and AMD. Nevertheless, the Intel system felt smoother, thanks to a much higher clock rate. I upgraded Lightroom to version 4.1RC2 and Adobe has done a brilliant job. Some slight improvement on the UI and several new featues, but most importantly, Lightroom performs much better with two monitors. As far as I’d experienced, it’s even with Lightroom 3, but there’s still room left to get it even smoother.