PC Build for Photoshop/Lightroom

D

Dmac122383

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 15, 2011
Messages
437
A friend (Professional Photographer) has asked me to help him build a PC to allow him to edit photos using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. He said he will be mainly editing photos and sometimes doing videos, he said doing videos is very minimal and hardly does them. I am completely lost when it comes to this type of work, I only know about hardware for gaming needs.


1) What will you be doing with this PC? Photoshop and lightroom for editing photos, will do a small number of videos
2) What's your budget? $1000 including tax and shipping
3) Which country do you live in? Buffalo, NY USA
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, MB, RAM, Power Supply, DVD/Bluray, Videocard, Case - You guys can probally leave out Case, I will just have him pick a case.
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? We will not be re using any parts
6) Will you be overclocking? No
7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? 1080p
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Within the next week to 2 weeks
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? USB 3.0
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit? Legit Windows 7 64bit, he plans to do the free upgrade to Win10

Like I said I'm not familiar with hardware for photo editing so I really dont know where to start for a CPU or videocard.

Thank you.
 
Hey man!

Wait for a few other oppinions but i'd personally go with the following:

CPU: i5 - 6400 - newegg - 189.99 $

MB: MSI H170A Gaming Pro - newegg - 116.98 $

Memory: G.SKILL 2x4 GB Ripjaws V Series - newegg - 53.99 $

Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 980 4GD5-OCV1-R - newegg - 389.98 $

Power Supply: EVGA 650W 220-G2-0650-Y1 - newegg - 65.98 $

Storage: Seagate 2TB Barracuda ST2000DM001 - amazon - 71.99 $
SAMSUNG 250GB 850 EVO MZ-75E250B/AM - amazon - 87.91 $

CPU Cooler: COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO RR-212E-20PK-R2 - amazon - 28.00 $


TOTAL: 1,005.81 $

That's what i'd go with :)
 
Regardless of most anything in the machine you or your friend chooses to build it from, there is one specific component you should not skimp on if the intended purpose is working with Photoshop and Lightroom and that component is RAM - buy as much of it as possible, or as much as the motherboard/chipset can support as long as it remains within the budget (even going so far as to sacrifice some other aspects to some degrees in favor of more RAM). It used to be about having a powerful CPU and fast storage, but as digital images and photos have increased in size over the decades, and with all the filters and processing that can take place, the primary need for such software now isn't processing power, it's raw memory aka RAM to make use of for doing said filtering and processing.

Yes, the CPU is still going to play a major part in the big picture (no pun intended) but these days programs like Photoshop and Lightroom are able to make use of the GPU aka the graphics card/chip/etc for doing processing work related to filtering or rendering, and the GPU is vastly more efficient at doing such things.

But RAM, never ever skimp on the RAM. If this friend is completely serious about building a machine he/she wants to use for Photoshop and Lightroom use primarily, then start at 16GB of RAM and buy more if possible, 24GB or even 32GB would be what I'd consider bare minimum for a photographic editing workstation machine - I am not kidding in the slightest.

If this person is truly a professional photographer or plans to become one and wants a serious machine to work with for the future that means he/she will be dealing with a lot of RAW images and those can be quite huge, like 25MB or larger per image and I've seen some RAW images that were 350MB+ in size so working with those types of files can suck up physical chip RAM incredibly fast, RAM is the top priority overall, followed by a decent quad core CPU minimum (4 physical cores minimum, not a dual core with hyperthreading to simulate 4 cores), and then some mid to high level graphics card and not some cheap $50 card that's on sale "but it has 4GB of video RAM..." - those things are literally a dime a dozen and should be avoided literally at all costs.

As for the actual hardware I'm not sure I'd be recommending anything myself at this point. The list above isn't so bad I suppose and it is a true quad core (it doesn't even support Hyper-Threading actually, it's 4 physical cores), but I'd probably choose another mobo personally - anything with "Gaming" in the name isn't a necessity and saving a few bucks on something that's just as useful means more money to spend on RAM.

Seriously, 8GB is just not enough for a professional photographer's PC, it just ain't. 16GB+ because Photoshop and Lightroom will both make use of every last byte of it whenever possible.

The video card choice isn't that bad either (my opinion, again) but my personal recommendation would be to get an Nvidia Quadro based card with 4GB of video RAM onboard, minimum. The Quadros come with certified drivers that hardly ever fail or have any issues whatsoever, will make the very best use of any potential GPU acceleration for Photoshop and Lightroom, and also comes with actual 24/7 phone support if needed which not many people ever take advantage of but for professional graphics work, even just manipulating photos on a computer, they are better cards than any consumer class GPU like the GeForce hardware is.

As stated, all personal opinions but I'll toot my own horn and admit that I've built over 200 photographic workstations for service bureaus over the past 20 years or so, and some of them are still operational to this day. If I was building such a box myself for that friend of yours, OP, it would have a Xeon CPU, 32GB of RAM (with a chunk of that assigned to a RAMdisk which makes Photoshop and Lightroom much much faster when properly configured because neither of those apps can manage memory for shit even nowadays), a Quadro video card w/4GB onboard, an SSD or two for the operating system + Photoshop and Lightroom and then 2-4TB of working storage and probably a DVD or Blu-ray drive for more permanent offline storage use as well.

I suppose that's my $.02 on the matter, so to speak. The machine I'd build would probably be a bit more than the $1,000 budget, approaching even $1,500 more than likely but not more than that - if this person intends to truly be a professional photographer or already is, this machine just becomes something he/she could write off their taxes in many respects and obviously it would make a good/great ROI in a short period of time as well. I'm a bit more serious about this type of hardware than your casual PC owner, in case you didn't guess that already, hence the recommendations for what many would not consider a "typical machine to edit pictures..." :D
 
Thanks for all the info. I will wait for some more recommendations and see what type of parts we come up with and also see if he can up the budget some more.
 
photoshop is very RAM heavy, lightroom isn't. Either way he will need at least 16GB. He will want a dedicated SSD to store working previews on and as a scratch disk, can probably go light on the graphics card.
 
I normally don't recommend a prebuilt, but this one is not too shabby.

HP ENVY 750se desktop: i7-6700 Skylake, GTX 970, 16GB DDR4 2133, 2TB 7200 RPM HDD, 500W PSU, DVD-RW, 802.11 b/g/n PCIe wifi, Windows 7 Professional ($882 after coupon code HOLIDAY30, bonus $50 HP gift card)



Another additional $50 off via Amex

https://sync.americanexpress.com/twitter/offerterms/FACB9E63731C14340B433ED8EE795D2D9

So that's $800 before tax with free shipping for a Skylake system, and you can still add a SSD and be within budget

EDIT:

Put this together for the hell of it....


PC Hound Part List

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600 6M ($221.49 @ TigerDirect)
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-B150M-D3H-GSM ($94.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Crucial 32GB (4 x 8GB) ($169.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: ASUS GeForce GTX 750 Ti GTX750TI-OC-2GD5 ($109.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: CORSAIR 450W CSM Series CS450M ($28.98 @ Newegg)
Storage: SAMSUNG 1TB 850 EVO MZ-75E1T0B/AM ($341.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $967.43
Price may include shipping, rebates, promotions, and tax
Generated by PC Hound
 
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staticlag said:
photoshop is very RAM heavy, lightroom isn't. Either way he will need at least 16GB. He will want a dedicated SSD to store working previews on and as a scratch disk, can probably go light on the graphics card.
Click to expand...

The whole point of me recommending 16GB minimum was because of setting aside a chunk of it for a RAMdisk where the scratch disk would then reside. Photoshop has never managed system RAM well, and even after so many years and so many versions, Adobe hasn't improved things at all. Having 16GB or even more in a system does not mean Photoshop runs well - in fact it can run surprisingly bad without some optimization but the fastest simplest most performance enhancing thing anyone can do (aside from giving it a ton of RAM to start with) is creating a RAMdisk and using that for the scratch disk.

No SSDs on the market today can touch what's possible with a RAMdisk, even multiple ones in RAID nor PCI-Express SSDs either. We're talking about a few gigabytes per second vs 20GB/s+ (with DDR4 it approaches 30GB/s or more so even better) of potential bandwidth so yeah, a RAMdisk will make Photoshop actions incredibly swift by comparison - I would hate to see someone wasting write cycles on even a brand new 5th generation SSD that has years of lifespan when RAM is not susceptible to such wear and way way waaaaay faster, especially when dealing with all the temp data created by Photoshop.

While it's entirely possible to have a monster machine with gobs of RAM and fast storage, I can guarantee you without a shadow of a doubt that whatever the monster machine is capable of with defaults across the board is nothing compared to what an optimized installation of Photoshop using a RAMdisk for scratch purposes is really capable of.

Sixthsense:

Wow, that is quite impressive for that price - with that discount in place and bumping the RAM to 24GB would bring it around $1,000 for the OP's friend's budget which is not bad, not bad at all. Nice hardware across the board, definitely, nice find.

Dmac122383:

You'd do well to show that machine from HP to your friend, absolutely. Mix and match a few components to get an SSD in there for the operating system and Photoshop and a hard drive or two for raw data storage and that would make a nice photographic workstation.
 
Tiberian said:
Sixthsense:

Wow, that is quite impressive for that price - with that discount in place and bumping the RAM to 24GB would bring it around $1,000 for the OP's friend's budget which is not bad, not bad at all. Nice hardware across the board, definitely, nice find.

Dmac122383:

You'd do well to show that machine from HP to your friend, absolutely. Mix and match a few components to get an SSD in there for the operating system and Photoshop and a hard drive or two for raw data storage and that would make a nice photographic workstation.
Click to expand...

Everyone is having buyer's remorse due to this deal lol, two things to note though for OP if you do go this route. Don't expect to upgrade the CPU. Usually you need a firmware update from the MB vendor. In some cases these pre builts don't have that as an option. That's the downside. Take it for what it is, 970 with a 6700 Skylake for $800? with a Win7 license and everything else in between. I'll take two please. The case doesn't look too shabby either.
 
Wow thank you SixthSense! I showed him this pc with the upgrades and we were surprised at the sale price with the coupon code. He is going to order it when he gets home from work tonite. Thank you all for the help.
 
Tiberian said:
The whole point of me recommending 16GB minimum was because of setting aside a chunk of it for a RAMdisk where the scratch disk would then reside.
Click to expand...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Photoshop uses the scratch disk when it runs out of RAM:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/memory-performance.html

When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Photoshop uses a proprietary virtual memory technology, also called scratch disks.
Click to expand...

In that case, how does setting up part of your memory as a RAMdisk benefit you? Photoshop is going to use that RAMdisk when it runs out of RAM, so why not skip the RAMdisk and let it use all the RAM?
 
Tiberian said:
The whole point of me recommending 16GB minimum was because of setting aside a chunk of it for a RAMdisk.
Click to expand...

Of course a ramdisk is faster, the problem is 1:1 previews in lightroom are huge (4-10MB/picture), plus RAW cache, plus catalog. Then normal program and OS operating RAM and you have already used 16GB of RAM.

SSDs are so dirt cheap now-a-days they are practically disposable, 250GB for $87 can store a months worth of previews and cache data, then if it burns out in 3 years just buy a newer faster one.

photoshop itself doesn't use a lot of RAM/scratch disk unless you are working at 24 or 32 bit color, are above 22 MP, are scanning film (this especially) and have tons of history.
 
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Epos7 said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that Photoshop uses the scratch disk when it runs out of RAM:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/memory-performance.html



In that case, how does setting up part of your memory as a RAMdisk benefit you? Photoshop is going to use that RAMdisk when it runs out of RAM, so why not skip the RAMdisk and let it use all the RAM?
Click to expand...

Because as I stated twice now: Photoshop (and Lightroom too) can't manage memory if Adobe's life depended on it. Yes I know they have a lot of support documents all over their website and on multiple forums online about how those applications manage memory, but by and large they suck at it in a native sense.

I can't explain it in extreme detail but if you're a Photoshop user (or Lightroom) and you have some excess RAM laying around, so to speak, using a RAMdisk utility of whatever kind - some are better and more reliable than others, some are much faster than others, etc - if you use a chunk of your excess RAM towards a RAMdisk and then you adjust Photoshop/Lightroom to put the scratch disk on the RAMdisk I promise you'll see performance improvements across the board - more in some tasks, maybe not so much but some in others.

Seriously, the natural state of Photoshop/Lightroom is to try and make use of every last byte of RAM possible (up to the amount the slider in the settings is adjusted for) but they do so with so horrible a level of inefficiency it's not even funny. It can work much better by creating a RAMdisk and pointing the scratch disk to the RAMdisk. I know it sounds ridiculous but it really does work and improves overall performance rather dramatically in some instances depending on the task(s) at hand.

I've built machines with 64GB of physical RAM (triple channel DDR3) and done benchmarks with Photoshop (typically a set of scripts that perform filtering tasks in sequence on an image and timing the full duration) and without using a RAMdisk - mind you this was done a few years ago with 7200 rpm hard drives, not SSDs, and Photoshop CS6 - to create a baseline for performance. Once that baseline was set, the benchmark was done 3 more times in succession to check it against the baseline and provide results that were +/- 5% of the actual baseline to prove it was consistent.

Then an 8GB RAMdisk was created (I used SuperSpeed's RAMdisk Plus at that time, a commercial RAMdisk product) and redid the benchmark in the same manner, 4 runs measured.

The time to complete the scripts overall was 65-68% faster than with just letting Photoshop have all the RAM it wanted of that 64GB (using the pure default installation settings).

I redid the RAMdisk and made it 16GB in size and the testing showed 80-83% faster performance.

I gave up trying to explain why Photoshop (and now Lightroom too) works better if you create a RAMdisk and point the scratch disk to use that as the target and just took to saying "Photoshop/Lightroom suck at memory management..." because they actually do. :D

You can test stuff yourself the same way if you use either or both of those apps; I recommend a free RAMdisk called ImDisk which is very tiny (the whole thing is under 400KB for the latest stable version), installs in like 2 seconds flat, appears as a Control Panel applet, can make multiple RAMdisks on the same machine in case you might need such a thing, and in my own testing of RAMdisk software showed itself to be the fastest one overall in terms of raw throughput both on read as well as write operations.

The scripting benchmark I use(d) is this one: KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark – V1(4)

As that one is quite old now and things have changed so much in terms of machine performance, storage, RAM speeds and capability as well as Photoshop/Lightroom too, I suppose I should start using something for testing that's more current and exploits the larger RAM capacity of modern hardware like this one:

http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshopCS6-Benchmarks.html

Should be interesting to see what modern hardware is capable of with that one. ;)
 
Thanks for that information, the performance improvements you saw are intriguing. I use Photoshop/Lightroom for personal use, and that combined with the fact that I'm currently running 16GB of RAM probably make the benefits of setting up a RAMdisk questionable. Once I move to 32GB of RAM in a year or so I'll have to revisit the RAMdisk option.
 
Epos7 said:
Thanks for that information, the performance improvements you saw are intriguing. I use Photoshop/Lightroom for personal use, and that combined with the fact that I'm currently running 16GB of RAM probably make the benefits of setting up a RAMdisk questionable. Once I move to 32GB of RAM in a year or so I'll have to revisit the RAMdisk option.
Click to expand...

Do some testing of some kind like one of those benchmark scripts to get a baseline for performance to measure against (do it perhaps 5 times and then average it) then use ImDisk to set up a 2-4GB RAMdisk sometime for testing purposes then adjust PS/LR so the scratch disk points to the RAMdisk and redo the testing again with 5 passes to get an average.

I'm confident you'll see an improvement - can't say how much but will confidently say it'll improve things over not using it that type of RAMdisk-enabled setup.
 
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