I have a Lenovo Legion T5 26IRB8 that I bought about two years ago, and Lightroom feels slow during heavier tasks, especially when creating masks. Windows identifies the motherboard as Lenovo 3769, which may be based on the Intel B660 platform, but I'm not completely sure how to verify that or which processors are officially supported.
My current system has an Intel Core i7-14700F, 64GB of DDR5 memory, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, a 2TB drive, and Windows 11. I was considering an i7-14700KF or another CPU under $400, partly for Lightroom and partly for gaming. Would that be a worthwhile upgrade, and what hardware or settings should I investigate first?
2 Answers
Mask creation is often tied to Lightroom’s AI processing and GPU acceleration rather than simply having a faster CPU. Check that Lightroom is using the RTX 4070 SUPER for graphics acceleration, update the NVIDIA driver and Lightroom, and make sure the catalog, previews, and Camera Raw cache are stored on a fast SSD with plenty of free space. If that 2TB drive is a mechanical hard drive, moving those files to an NVMe SSD could make a much larger difference than changing the processor. Also test with GPU acceleration enabled and disabled, since driver or compatibility issues can occasionally make the GPU path slower.
The i7-14700F is already a very powerful processor, so replacing it probably won’t produce a meaningful improvement. The 14700KF has higher clocks and an unlocked multiplier, but it also draws more power and produces more heat. A Lenovo prebuilt motherboard and cooling system may not support those higher power limits properly, so it isn’t a straightforward upgrade. The CPU is unlikely to be the main reason Lightroom feels slow.
The slowdown is most noticeable when I’m creating masks in Lightroom. Most other features feel fine, which is why I’m trying to determine whether the CPU is actually the bottleneck.