Photo Editing $1000 budget

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Photoshop and other photo editing

2) What's your budget? $1000 before tax or shipping

3) Which country do you live in? US, and NH

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget?
Case, Power Supply, Mobo, Cpu, Ram, Gpu, Hard drives.

6) Will you be overclocking? No

7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it? 1080p 2x24"

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Within 2 weeks

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? Was thinking possibly going with a xeon and a workstation gpu? Any thoughts? Raid most likely for efficient movement of large files and caching

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? Windows 10 64bit Pro

Thank you

I hate alway recommending prebuilts but as a fellow photographer gonna have to suggest another i7 dell here. Get one on sale for 700 ish with a 4790 or 6700 non k. Use the Xtra moolah to add a ssd for either os or scratch disk.

I currently use a 5930k for photo editing and to be honest I can't really see as much a difference between my 5930k. My old 4820k or my old 4970k.

You can more or less get whatever you want. The only things that will matter is if you're going to go 100% 10-bit signal chain or not and of course what monitor you're using... as well as some form of hardware calibration (I recommend the X-Rite i1 Display Pro or a Colormunki if you're on a budget).

If you have a budget for it, you can get an NEC color accurate refurb right now for $360. Specifically the 27" 2560x1440 one... which normally is over $1500 (I believe). I personally feel like 1080p is a bit restrictive when trying to view images. 16MP cameras from a Fuji as an example are 4896x3264. 22MP out of a 5D3 are 5615x3744. Obviously 36MP and 50MP are substantially larger. 1080P is really just not a lot of real estate for photos. Even on two screens. If you can afford a 4k color accurate monitor, so much the better. But for now, it's out of reach for most of us (at $3k). That said, having 2560x1440 is a substantial step up.

-16GB of RAM is nice to have and not unaffordable. Especially useful if you want to retouch while multi-tasking. This will matter the most if you have large file sizes (or are multi-tasking like I stated). Typically for me, a finished PSD will be between 600MB-1.2GB. If you have a lot of photos with large file sizes open at any given time, then obviously you'll want more RAM. I also generally have CaptureOne open all the time and other things like browsers, Spotify, a Mail app, etc.
-Get a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro (or Evo if your budget doesn't allow for the Pro) as your primary drive. My HD's that actually hold images are all external. If you can afford an external SSD (or prefer to keep it internal, than that is an option) to edit off of, then that is recommended too. USB 3 is plenty fast. If not, then get a 7200RPM standard rotational drive. I keep everything externally for backup reasons. When you use TBs per year, eventually trying to keep all your photos internally becomes untenable. SSD speed doesn't matter as much for photo editing. It will mostly affect opening and saving. Other than that, it's all in your RAM. SSDs to open 1GB files are more for us inpatient people.
-Any decent video card that does OpenCL will be fine. A gaming card won't be necessary, but what GPU you choose will matter once again if you're trying to go for 10-bit signal chain... very few setups allow for it anyway and it's not without its own headaches. If you're only going to be doing in sRGB (which 99.9% of us are) then 8-bit is more than sufficient.
-If you can afford an i7 Quad, go with that. Having the hyper-threading is nice. But it's not critical. Using an i5 quad without hyper-threading should still be more than sufficient. It'll only become more of an issue if you're multi-tasking or if you start to do video work (like in Premiere).

Other than that you could more or less select everything you need virtually brainlessly. I've been spending a lot of time (8-12 hours a day) recently doing retouch work on a 15" Macbook Pro Retina... it doesn't even have a discreet GPU. But between the PCI-E SSD, 16GB of RAM, i7 Quad, and the calibrated IPS screen, it's more than sufficient for print work... basically what I'm trying to say is, creating a dedicated Photoshop machine doesn't take much. There was a time in which Photoshop was considered to be a heavy program. But modern machines with modern components crunch through it pretty quick, even using budget parts.


EDIT: I reread your post. I think I answered most of your questions, but I'll answer this for clarity.

Wicked_Bass said:

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? Was thinking possibly going with a xeon and a workstation gpu? Any thoughts? Raid most likely for efficient movement of large files and caching

Click to expand...

You can throw in Xeons if you'd like. But it won't really give you great benefit in Photoshop. You'll notice a bigger difference if you're working in Avid, Premiere, Vegas, or some other non-linear video editor. Photoshop doesn't need to do a lot of calculations in order to operate... with the notable exception of filters. If you're serious about photography, you're probably not using many filters anyway with the exception of perhaps Unsharpen Mask, Gaussian Blur, Puppet Warp, and Liquify (and maybe some others if you're into plug-in providers like Topaz Adjust and the Nik Collection)... and although Liquify and Puppet Warp are mildly intensive, it's not something necessitating Xeons... unless you just want Xeons.

Same for workstation GPUs... you're drawing a 2D object. Photoshop doesn't need huge amounts of GPU power to operate. And because OpenCL is available on everything... even something "old" like a 750Ti would be sufficient. It's not like these 2D objects require a massive frame buffer or have a lot to decode/encode. Once again, if you're doing video and need to render 60fps or more in real time, a workstation GPU would become significantly more useful. For a static image, it's not going to speed up much. If you want to put in an expensive card just for fun, go ahead. Just know that it's not necessary.

RAID again is the same thing. Once you open a file in Photoshop, provided you have enough RAM, the entire image is then held in RAM. Only if you run out of RAM does Photoshop need to start caching on an HD. Therefore RAID won't help you do anything other than open files faster and save them faster. For video, however RAID is useful for spitting out many images to be rendered quickly as well as accessing multiple files in a timeline seamlessly to render without encoding. RAID can have a huge impact on video, but for Photoshop it's not going to do much. As a result: if you're running 50-80MP files in Photoshop, I would probably recommend 32GB or 64GB of RAM before recommending RAID.

So, if you're considering investing in video equipment and shooting and editing video than Xeons, Workstation GPUs, and RAID would be much more useful. But if you simply want a purpose built machine for Photoshop, none of them are necessary. Nor will any of them offer a significant speed boost for the extremely large increase in price in comparison with "standard" parts.
Even if you are shooting video, then it may be very important to check your requirements. A quad core i7, a nice SSD, and a $200 GPU is going to be plenty to cut together 1080p video. Having an extreme setup is only necessary if you have extreme requirements. If you're shooting 6k video at 120fps (and for some reason you "MUST" playback the video at 120fps as opposed to at a slower rate) and you have it color corrected and graded, it's RAW 4-2-2 (or greater), and you want to do this all in realtime, then you may finally have a usage case that would benefit from all that power.

Thank you both for your replies. I ended up getting a dell precision workstation from the outlet

Precision T1700
Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1226 v3 Processor (Quad Core, 3.30GHz Turbo, 8MB, w/ HD Graphics P4600)
Windows 8 Pro (Free Upgrade to Windows 10 Pro)
1 TB SATA Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
16GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1600Mhz
16X DVD +/- RW Drive
Dual AMD FirePro W4100 2GB (4 mDP) (8 mDP-DP adapters)
Dell Outlet Precision T1700 Mini Tower

was $999 free shipping

Looks like it will be well more than you need. I'd recommend getting an SSD for your boot drive, but other than that, you should tear through anything in PS really.