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Building a PC for Photoshop.

W

Westwood

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Nov 17, 2012
Messages
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Greetings.

Wife asked me yesterday to build her her own PC so she can use Photoshop.

Having built a PC for gaming, there any difference between the two? I built my rig about two or three years ago. Nothing spectacular. i5, 16gb RAM, 770, etc. It runs PS ok but it does lag a little here and there. Its not installed on a SSD so perhaps that would help. She wants two displays and I do have an old 8800 on a shelf somewhere; would that work? PS benefit that much from a decent GPU? i5 going to be enough or should I jump to an i7?

If it looks like I need to build a PC as I would for gaming, I'll just have her use mine and build a new gaming PC for myself. :cool:

Thanks for reading.
 
That should be fine, when it comes to heavy photoshop/2d work you want lots of ram, and a good, efficient processor for processing filters. When I worked for a few game developers, we had quadro video cards (for the modelers) and as much ram as we could fit in each system. The only time you would really want a faster than average system is if you're going to be processing very large images with multiple filter passes. However, systems have come a long way, and most any core2 or faster system is perfectly acceptable.
 
Good to know. I haven't looked up any PC specs since I built mine so I'm a bit outdated.

Are you saying something small like an i3 and my 8800 would run it ok? Just stack the RAM a mile high? I'd obviously run an SSD.

This is strictly for photography (wedding photos).
 
Westwood Arrakis said:
Good to know. I haven't looked up any PC specs since I built mine so I'm a bit outdated.

Are you saying something small like an i3 and my 8800 would run it ok? Just stack the RAM a mile high? I'd obviously run an SSD.

This is strictly for photography (wedding photos).
Click to expand...

Yes that should be perfectly fine. It goes without saying, but make sure it's an x64 OS to use the RAM.

For photo editing, high resolution (14MP+) RAW images can use CPU power for sure, but it should be perfectly fine. The real advantage of a powerful system would be if she was doing very large RAW batch operations with multiple filter passes. Really high volume work benefits the most.
 
If you are looking for speed in a specific program that is run most of the time, I would suggest looking into getting something like 32Gb of ram and making a RAM drive. I would also use an SSD to install the OS, program files & image files (Make sure the pagefile.sys is located on the SSD). When the system is booted, copy all the files that are to be worked with to the ram drive and use the ram drive as the save drive and "clipboard" when working. After done working with PS, copy all the files back to the SSD. The thing is that the ram drive is volatile which means it erases every time the computer is shut off.

If you plan on doing this, I would suggest creating a couple batch files that can be run to automatically create folders on the ram drive and then copy the necessary files from the SSD. Another batch file would copy all the files from the ram drive over to the SSD once finished working in PS. It may also be a good idea to create a batch file that is run like every 5 mins (run via scheduler) that copies files from the ram drive to a "work in process" folder on the SSD (this would copy any files changed since the last time the batch was run) this way if the computer BSOD's or power is lost, work completed in PS will not be lost when the ram drive is deleted. These batch files are not to complex and pretty basic. I would also suggest another batch file (or some backup program) that copies image data files from the SSD to something more stable as I have found SSD's can often give little to no warning before biting it. Coping to a standard HD would be preferable.


I've also seen the entire OS loaded onto a ram drive as the system was a virtual machine (VM was copied to ram drive before running), so that everything within the system was run at ram speed. This was a super fast machine!
 
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