I have a Lenovo Legion T5 26IRB8 that I bought about two years ago, and I'm trying to determine whether its motherboard is actually an Intel B660-based Lenovo 3769 board. I currently have an Intel Core i7-14700F, 64GB of DDR5 memory, an RTX 4070 SUPER, a 2TB hard drive, and Windows 11. Lightroom feels slow during heavier work, especially when creating masks, even though the computer handles modern games at very high settings. I was considering an i7-14700KF or another processor costing less than $400, but I'm not sure which CPUs are compatible or whether the upgrade would make a noticeable difference. Is the processor really the bottleneck, and what should I check first?
2 Answers
The i7-14700F is already a very powerful processor, so replacing it with a 14700KF probably won’t provide a meaningful improvement. They’re closely related chips with the same general core configuration; the KF mainly adds an unlocked multiplier but loses integrated graphics. The K/KF models can also draw more power, and a Lenovo motherboard and cooling system may not be designed to run them at their full limits. Your existing board may support some 14th-generation CPUs, but compatibility alone doesn’t make the upgrade worthwhile.
Mask creation uses Lightroom’s AI features and can depend heavily on GPU acceleration, image previews, storage speed, and the specific operation being performed. A fast gaming GPU does not guarantee that every Lightroom task will feel instant. Check that GPU acceleration is enabled, update the NVIDIA driver, and keep the catalog, previews, and active photo files on a fast SSD rather than a mechanical hard drive. Also make sure the system is not running out of memory or thermal-throttling. Before buying a CPU, monitor CPU, GPU, disk usage, temperatures, and clock speeds while creating a mask; that will show which component is actually limiting performance.
The slowdown is mostly noticeable when Lightroom is generating masks. Normal editing is generally fine, so I’m trying to figure out whether that points to a different bottleneck than the CPU.