It’s rated up to 4.8GHz on a single-core, and all-core boost clocks are typically well above 4GHz. It has 12 Zen 3 cores and supports up to 24 threads thanks to simultaneous multithreading. The Best CPU for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom – AMD Ryzen 5900Xįor the best overall performance in both Photoshop and Lightroom while keeping costs reasonable, the AMD Ryzen 5900X found in the Chillblast Photo Pro Zen Editing PC, is the processor for the job. In fact, there are a few good reasons why you might want to opt for a more mid-range option. Generally speaking then, picking a processor from 2020 onwards will guarantee you the best photo-editing performance in both Photoshop and Lightroom, though you needn’t buy the fastest and most expensive. Newer architectures allow higher clock speeds and higher instructions per clock, which in many ways have a greater impact on photo editing performance than core counts (especially once you have six or more). An eight-core processor from 2017 will be vastly slower than one of the latest-generation chips from 2020 or 2021. The next most important factor in how fast your photo editing PC will be is your processor’s architecture – its generation. Though even then it tends to only be around 10 percent faster than a 16-core option, overall. Although there are some tasks that see some slight benefit with as many as 64-cores on the top-end AMD Threadripper processor, the sweet spot appears to be around 24 cores. Lightroom is a little different, in that its photo export and preview functions can take advantage of many more cores. That said, there are diminishing returns.Īdobe Photoshop makes excellent use of up to eight cores for many of its most important tasks, but you won’t see any huge performance gains once you go over that number. Like modern games, modern photo editing software has grown far better at taking advantage of contemporary multi-core processors, so you can see a big improvement in your Photoshop and Lightroom performance by using processors with higher core counts. If you bought any processor in the past near-20 years you’d be able to match that specification.īut we want to know what the best CPUs for Photoshop and Lightroom are, and that means something much more capable. Both Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom have very low minimum system requirements, only demanding an AMD or Intel 64-bit CPU that has a clock speed of at least 2GHz.

Lightroom and photoshop