Need a GPU for Lightroom 5.7 photo editing on a 27 incher monitor and 4 year old rig

[Philmar]

Received the monitor today and setting up was a breeze. Base, arm and screen easy to assemble.

Had absolutely NO problems running it on my 4 year old processor's HD4000 graphics - even have the NEC 20WMGX2 as a 2nd monitor with both running at their native resolutions.

The BenQ is at 2560x1440 - w10 drivers were installed but not as easily as the manual said it would be.

Good news: It is connected using the supplied mini DP to DP wire: the Mini DP plug in my Intel mobo's Thunderbird port and the DP plug in to the monitor. Never thought that I'd ever use that port but am so glad I didn't have to go out and waste an hour buying another cable. Still don't know why they included it and not a DP to DP cable.

I am happy to say that I see almost NO performance degradation with LR 5.7.

Small difference: when in Library mode and scrolling in Grid view is a bit choppy.

Small difference: Bit more time required to cycle between regular and zoom when in Loupe view.

Performance differences are negligible - to the point I regret the considerable time I wasted researching it. Guess my i7 3770K and mobo were good choices 3 years ago...and happy I won't need a GPU!! And luckily I didn't buy that 'value' GPU.

Though it is early days thus far...I'll report any issues.

 

[jcdeboever]

You have excellent hardware, I built many box's with that board. You would notice a small improvement with a dedicated 128 bit Quadro Nvidia, workstation graphics card. The drivers are fantastic and optimized for LR and other graphic applications. They are not cheap though, you are paying for stability and reliability. If you are satisfied with current performance, that's what is important. The GPU of the Intel exceeds minimum requirements for LR.

 

[Philmar]

Thanks jcdeboever,
Turns out I was wrong...my mobo is the Asus P8Z77-V PRO/THUNDERBOLT ATX LGA1155 Motherboard.

Did a system upgrade. Monitor is playing very well with LR now. At time of first use, it was slowing down when I was using crop tool - this forces LR to change zoom to fit in to screen. As a result, I added a second SSD as the LR lrdata previews file (> 100 GBs) had almost filled my SSD C boot drive. Also I swapped out a spin hard drive that was dying with a new one. The problems disappeared completely.

I'm not a techie, but I suspect it had to do with the windows page file being on the 'soon to be toast' data dick drive as well as the fact performance was degraded by my boot drive being near capacity. I've moved the LR catalogue and all the lrdata/lrcat files on to a new secondary SSD drive.

One or both of the actions above has resulted in a performance boost. My i7 3770K and intel onboard 4000 graphics are now running LR on the BenQ with NO appreciable perceptible difference when compared to the smaller 20 inch monitor I used previously - and have hooked up as a second monitor. Also I calibrated the BenQ with the BenQ software which adds the profile to the monitor's LUT (just reporting what I read - can't say I understand what that meams). Someone suggested that this could also take some of the burden off of the CPU.

The only difference I see now is when I scroll quickly between files in the Library mode. They take longer to come in to sharp focus that they did previously.

I did all these changes at the same time so i can't say with any certainty which of the 3 things contributed most to my performance boost.