On Sat, 26 Nov 2016 17:30:59 +0100, Rico Heil wrote: > I am currently in the process of selecting the components for my new PC. > > The only really "CPU-consuming" task for this computer will be > developing my RAW photos using darktable. > > I am unsure if I should buy an Intel Core i5-6500 or if it would be > worth to pay 110 € more and get a Core i7-6700. Both CPUs feature 4 > cores, the main difference seems to be that the i5 is lacking > hyperthreading, which the i7 supports (and a little bit higher clock > rate with the i7). > > Does anybody know, how much of a difference (if any) I should experience > between those two processors while using darktable? > > Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience!
The PassMark (http://www.cpubenchmark.net) number for the i7-6700K is 11,044; for the i5-6500, it's 7072. My experience has been that this provides a pretty good measure for heavily multi-threaded CPU-intensive workloads, which darktable is in large part. For operations that don't parallelize as well, the single thread PassMark number is also of interest; for the 6700 it's 2341 while for the 6500 it's 1945. The upshot is that you should expect somewhere between 20% and 55% improvement with the 6700. There are faster CPUs. The i7-5820K, for example, has a PassMark number of 12980 and a single thread rating of 2010. That's because it has more cores (6 vs. 4). The i7-4790K is 11187 while its single thread rating is 2527 (which is the fastest available). I've found that my 5820K can process about 10 20MP photos/minute with typical noise reduction and such; it looks like it's keeping the processor mostly busy. It's a little more expensive than the 6700K, but I bought it on sale. Offhand, I'd say that the i7-6700K would be a very good affordable choice if you're doing a lot of photos. Make sure you get plenty of RAM (at least 16GB). An SSD for your root+home directory would be a good idea, but for your bulk image storage, it won't help you as much. The RAW processing is not especially I/O-intensive; 10x20MP images is only about 250MB in and 100MB out, so call it 350 MB/minute, or 6 MB/sec. This I/O streams well, so you're nowhere near limited by disk I/O (typically around 100 MB/sec for conventional spinning media). -- Robert Krawitz <r...@alum.mit.edu> *** MIT Engineers A Proud Tradition http://mitathletics.com *** Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton ____________________________________________________________________________ darktable user mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to darktable-user+unsubscr...@lists.darktable.org
