I need some advice please. I have built my own mid-range rigs for occasional gaming for about 10 years. But a friend at work has asked me to build him a cheap pc purely for basic Photoshop work only. He only has a £500 budget which is about $750 and only needs a base unit. He has peripherals, OS and monitor etc already.
I have a DVD drive that he wants I can donate, have advised will be best with an SSD and an HDD for storage, 16GB memory preferably 32GB memory. But I suspect his budget won't stretch to 32GB, maybe not even 16GB. He's happy with a cheap and cheerful case.
My main query is will I be better off building with a dedicated GPU and basic CPU. Or is a good CPU more important or is an APU a better route? I have never had anyone ask me to do a build for this purpose and have never used Photoshop myself so I have no idea what is more important. I can use eBay etc for second hand parts if need be. It's general help as to what's best I need. But if anyone has the time and urge to do a list of recommended parts I would be truly grateful.
okay here is a skylake build PS is rather CPU intensive using GPU for hardware acceleration from what I have read. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/7rFVNG
This build uses a lower ended skylake, but should be good for years to come, is uses DDR4 and I have put in a SSD but Omitted an HDD. This will be easier than getting a large HDD and then later having to move OS to SSD, so He will have to find a storage drive, but for what this build is, I feel that it is worth it with most of everything you asked, even the 16gb of DDR4
Thats a pretty good budget for a photoshop build for base unit only
go with strong cpu and an entry level gpu (almost all non 3d tasks in photoshop arent gpu accelerated), practically anyone two gens ago amd or nvidia second hand will do.
if its a ddr3 build you might be able to stretch to 32gb as avoiding the scratch disk is the biggest time saver of all in photoshop work.
Thank you. Yep plenty of scope for adding on extras later like another stick of memory, another drive etc. As you say should be good for years on Skylake. Your time and help is appreciated.
May i present to you, 8 core CPU for 130$... 8320... Comes with cheaper DDR3, that can fit about 16 of them, and any GPU, even 230, 730 or whatever will do the job... And the core count and huge amount of ram (not sure about the ram though) will outperform the single channel ram and 4 cores of the i5... Hell, 6350 outperforms i5 in photoshop...
This is what I was wondering about. So image manipulation, previews etc is primarily CPU based? That is why I was thinking an AMD build might be better for him.
If this is a pure photoshop build dont spend more than 80 to 100 on the gpu (you are practically only using it for 2d acceleration), use that money on a better cpu or more ram instead
Including the insane option with a 1TB SSD on an APU based build, also would have more RAM than the i5, but naturally the i5 is going to be faster if he's doing really heavy tasks, the APU should be find overall though