Not really. 16GB is more than DXO will utilize. SSD helps overall speed but DXO doesn’t do tons of Disk IO for raw files like a video editor would do for video files. Yeah SSD makes everything faster but…
You will benefit most from CPU speed, CPU cores, GPU power (only during exporting DeepPRIME) and memory bus speed.
I recently got the Dell Inspiron Plus 14 with the i7 CPU and Nvidea GPU. The screen is 14", 2.2k and is 100% sRGB. Very pleased with the system performance with DxO Photolab 5, my only grumble is that the battery life is average at best.
It also comes in a 16" version too, with otherwise similar specs, I believe.
AMD has just announced new laptop CPUs with first Notebooks to arrive in March (AMD Ryzen 7940HS). They are supposed to include a dedicated AI chip that they say is faster than Apple’s M2. The question is, will Photolab and other software support that kind of chip? It is for sure an interesting development, myself I want to wait a bit to see if that allows me to buy something without dedicated GPU.
This is exciting news. I’ve previously read that Intel are looking to add an AI processor to their chips this year too.
I agree, it would be brilliant if Photolab is able to leverage these neural units for DeepPrime like it does with the Apple M1/2 SoCs.
The only downside I see for Windows users is that with AMD and Intel, Photolab has two systems it would need to be compatible with whereas with Apple they just have the one, so I hope DxO is willing to put in the effort to work with the offerings from both manufacturers.
People often overspend on hardware as they are too focused on export performance. You can spend a ton of money to cut down on export speed but does this really matter that much? Most important at least for a casual hobbyist is that the editing experience is very snappy and smooth. To achieve this, you only need a half decent machine. 16GB of ram and a mid-range CPU are enough, and GPU is only relevant when you export.
If you want to spend around NZ$3k then I would take a very good look at the current MacBook Pro 14 or 16 inch base models. They are now often discounted (10-20%). You would get a fantastic price to performance ratio, a class leading display and incredible battery life. I didn’t think any Windows machine can offer this at the moment.
Disclaimer, I own a powerful Windows PC and a 14 inch MacBook Pro (10/16/16 CPU/GPU/Ram) and the MacBook is incredible for editing. Even the base model is super smooth.
Like in most things, it all depends. If someone regularly exports a large number of very large raw files with lots of edits and DeepPRIME XD applied, they may find the export time disappointedly slow with a lower end supported GPU. Of course the same exercise with an unsupported GPU would likely be completely unacceptable.
Mark
Mark, that is why I said ‘casual hobbyist’. For more demanding professionals or enthusiasts speed matters more.
Let’s be honest, what difference does it make if export time for a day’s worth shoot of say 500 images if it takes 30 minutes or an hour to export when the editing experience is very smooth regardless and likely took a lot more time than the final export.
I am just saying that this is a good way to save money if someone wants to. They would still have a great editing experience which matters most. Same applies to video editing.
As I said, as in most things it all depends. What works for you might not be the best option for someone else’s requirements, casual shooter or not. Obviously if cost is a major factor than compromises must be made.
Mark.
Mark, we are going in circles. I just stated an option for someone who wants to buy a new machine. I see it so often that people don’t realize this speed trade off as an OPTION.
My statement is still correct. DXO won’t utilize more than 16GB. If you have a 16GB RAM disk well then yeah you need an EXTRA 16GB for that. That’s kind of “duh” right?
I have 40GB in my system. But DXO runs fine with 16.
Actually you will. I purchased a gaming laptop with 8 core Ryzen 5900HS CPU and 3070GPU with 8GB of VRAM and 16GB of main memory and it screams running Photolab. Very fast for edits and very fast exports with DeepPRIME.
I eventually upgraded it to be able to support video editing with 8K sources. And Photolab didn’t run faster after the upgrade.
You can keep trying to dig your hole deeper but you are still wrong. 16GB is plenty to run Photolab.
The single largest improvement I have done is purchase a powerful GPU. Most photography software (including DXO) utilizes the GPU for other things than exporting. I use a Windows 11 desktop computer with 8.00 GB of RAM, and a good GPU, and everything runs great.
DXO only needs a few gigs. Seriously. Not sure why you keep arguing. Take however much total Ram you have in your system. Make your ram disk larger so that only 16GB of ram is left and try it. You will see.
I.e. if you have 64GB of ram make a 48GB RAM disk and try it. It works just fine and no slower.
Im done arguing with you. You are arguing just to argue. And you are still wrong.
Thanks for all the input. I am happy with my decision …
What did you get?
I ordered this, and it will probably arrive tomorrow when I am at work.
While it may be overkill, I did look at recommended spesc for DxO, and for once in my life I could afford to exceed those.
I am at retirement age, some of my family say I should be retired! However I believe if one is capable, willing, enjoying it, valued, then continue. Although, when we are short staffed as lately, two nurses down per shift it can very demanding.
So - I see this purchase as a bit of a treat, and hopefully some future proofing, as it seems Operating Systems and Software become more resource heavy as time goes on, although that drain has diminished slightly, recently with Windows updates … I remember a time when upgrading OS meant a new computer.
It should arrive tomorrow, and I look forward to exporting files to PSE without it crashing 
And, by chance, I was just redirected to their website, and the price has reverted to $400 more! The original price.
I will also add regarding Apple - Apple Computers, at every opportunity, has actively bribed US senators and government officials in other countries, including Australia to block the right to repair movement. I simply cannot support a company such as Apple that has such disdain for their customer(s).
Hi Rose,
Just as a FYI - DXO v2.0.2 (around 6 months old) will work with Lightroom v6 (I currently use it with v6). The latest DXO installers have removed silently removed compatibility with these older Lightroom versions (I found out the hard way and took near 1.5 hours of troubleshooting to figure the problem out). I had luckily kept my old v2.0.2 installer, so was able to revert from the installer for the latest version.
Of course, running v2.0.2 means not being able to update DXO to future versions.
If you want the v2.0.2 installer, I can put it up to my Google drive for you to grab a copy of, since I am pretty sure DXO won’t provide it to you, even upon request.
I contacted DXO Support and they were rather unhelpful to say the least. Their attitude, at least, as far as I am personally concerned, was appalling and this will be the ONLY and LAST product that I will buy from them. I put my money where my mouth is.
I would avoid Apple like the plague - their RAM and HDDs are hard soldered to the mainboard and have no updateability down the track. What you initially buy, you are stuck with for the life of the laptop. Sadly, many other manufacturers are also venturing down this horrible path and screwing consumers over. This is why I refuse to buy any new Apple laptop, post mid 2013 15" MacBook Pro, which was the last user updateable laptop from them. As someone who has worked in the IT industry for near 20 years, I refuse to pay the AHT (Apple Hardware Tax) for hard drives and RAM - Apple charges you 3 to 4x the retail price for these items on their products (i.e. a ripoff).
Regarding the HP Omen gaming laptop - it has an AMD Radeon GPU. This will use OpenCL, rather than Nvidia’s CUDA. No One uses OpenCL for GPU acceleration for AI purposes. You are far better off going for a version of said laptop with a Nvidia GPU. HP usually offers different variants of their gaming laptops with either AMD or Intel CPUs and AMD or Nvidia GPUs. IMHO, you are best to go with a AMD CPU (Ryzen 7 will be fine, but I would recommend at least 8 cores as processing will scale with the core/thread count) and Nvidia GPU. The 1650 GPU is perfectly fine for AI processing and CUDA performance, but newer Nvidia 3060 mobile GPUs would definitely be better as they have more CUDA cores.
Your 2nd HP post is more like it. That should be a beast and run very, very nicely.
I personally wouldn’t worry too much about the display - if you are doing pro grade mission critical images that you are selling to customers, then yes, look for a screen that can support the Adobe RGB ICC profile. Otherwise, sRGB will be perfectly fine, especially if you are an amateur publishing your images on social media. There is no need to spend the price differential for an Adobe RGB screen imho in the latter instance.
32GB of main system RAM will be plenty, even with Windows 11. A good fast NVME hard drive (preferably PCiE v4) will really help with the drive I/O performance speeds. Your 2nd HP Omen laptop has this type of hard drive. If your HP is like my HP gaming laptop (much lower end than the Ones you are considering), you should be able to replace both the RAM and add a SSD hard drive yourself (it should have a spare 2.5" SSD hard drive bay, to accompany the NVME hard drive that it comes with - but I would check with HP first).
My experiences with HP support have been pretty horrid though. They left a lot to desire - it took me 4 months of arguing with them to replace the default Wireless card which has known issues in EVERY laptop it has been used in from any manufacturer. They ended up capitulating when I mentioned formally making a Fair Trade complaint and provided me with a Intel wireless card (rather than the basically dead Realtek card that my laptop shipped with originally). Said laptop now works without issue wirelessly.
I’m with MikeR here AttaBoy. Getting more RAM (than 16GB) will ultimately make DXO run smoother because the operating system underneath it is running smoother. Having only 16GB means Windows utilising ~6-8GB RAM for optimal perforance, leaving only ~10-8GB RAM for DXO. Of course, Windows utilises RAM very poorly (vs the competition). GNU/Linux I/O peformance outperforms both Windows and MacOS. I base that assertion on 25 years of using GNU/Linux, and nearly 20 years of using Macs (and nearly 2 years working for Apple Computers as a technician). Windows has always been a pile of you know what.
But - CPU and GPU will, imho, make more of a difference to the performance of DXO than RAM imho, Rose. The more cores, the better. The more CUDA cores, the better. AI performance via CUDA core numbers will scale.
An excellent choice Rose. It will perform admirably. It is money well invested and will return dividends with not only DXO, but Lightroom and Photoshop. The Adobe Photography CC is well worth investing in too - the AI masking is amazing. With that said, I just purchased a stand alone licence for C1 Pro 23 as I hope to get into studio portraiture down the track and I really like the colour editing that C1 offers.
Yes, this is very true. Most modern propriatery developers are well, not particularly good imho. Bloated code, and lots of bugs. Open Source development has ALWAYS been a superior development model imho. The GNU/Linux kernel has improves numbers for bugs per 1000 lines of code - certainly far better than any proprietary operating system.
If you have other questions, I am happy to offer advice.
Cheers,
Dave
Thanks for the information. And sorry about the late reply. I worked a few days and then was tired, then had to reset password as couldn’t remember it!
I’m happy with my purchase, and using DxO PL6 … still have a lot to learn, and need to watch some tutorials and practise, but tend to do this as I need to.
I did try the Adobe subscription for a year when it first started, but as I don’t do a lot in Photoshop, it just wasn’t worth it for me. That’s when I continued to use my standalone Lightroom. If I hadn’t bought a new camera I would still be doing most of my conversion there. I’ve had my money’s worth out of the standalone Lightroom though, so am happy about that.
Ages ago a friend’s husband suggested to avoid Apple products because they are so “locked up”, and so I have not gone there, and reviews I’ve read have suggested that Apple’s edge over Windows for photography software, has diminished over time. Regardless, I am not changing systems … except that I may well have another dabble in Linux on my “old” laptop. I ran it for several years before buying my first DSLR.
Thanks for your input
Cheers Rose
Apple has nothing to do with Lightroom. Lightroom does run on both MacOS and MIcrosoft Windows, but the latter is typically a very poorly coded O/S that typically runs like a dog. I’ve used a lot of O/S over the years, and Microsoft’s have been the worst of the lot, by far. Just my honest 2c worth. I might be biased as I’m a UNIX guy at heart.
I have both Adobe Photography CC subscripitoin, and a stand alone licence for C1 pro 23 (which I only just purchased a week ago). I have zero need for PL6 etc, plus the shenanigans with DXO Pure RAW2 mean I’d never give DXO any more of my money. It’s just the way that I roll 
I prefer Photoshop to either Lightroom or C1 pro, but that’s just me. I will say that Lightroom, modern lightroom that is, is far more powerful than the older Lightroom v5/6. Night and day difference in capabilities.