Cheap basic pc for basic home Photoshop use only $750/£500 budget. Help!

Hardware Build a PC
21

If you go that route just look more into what the best 1TB SSD would be

22

My route has a much better cpu with the same amount of ram but half the storage.

If the guy is not using more than 400GB of space, I would argue that my build is better.

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Thank you all. I need to talk to him more and establish how much disk space he is going to actually need etc. I really appreciate all the input.

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Im sure people will come up with good builds for you, on a side note I would say if you get a decent i5 you wont need a GPU for basic photoshop work at all :) as long as he isnt gaming which sounds like he isnt

25

also find out what sort of resolution he is working to

if its output to screen then ram doesnt really matter that much (you can easily get by with 2x4)

monster amounts of ram is only really necessary for high res print work

and I second what people are saying about integrated graphics, i keep forgetting how much that has improved.

26

Depending on what you're doing...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/photoshop-cs6-gimp-aftershot-pro,3208-13.html

Kind of old at this point I think, but an APU will beat an i5 with GPU acceleration naturally in any workload that allows for it, everything blue has acceleration turned on

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Thanks. I do have a final option which is to sell him my HTPC rig and then have an excuse to build a new one ;-) i5 4430, GTX660 2GB, 256SSD 2TB HDD, 8GB @ 1600, Corsair PSU. Would do him fine I suspect. But that then opens a whole can of worms for what to build for myself. But that's a last resort as is a good little rig. Plus have no idea what it's worth really.

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Hi,

Yes of course, sorry I agree, not really up to speed with AMD APU's but I'm sure yes it could perform better :) depends what "basic" means too... allot of Photoshop and the creative suite doesn't even use many cores or hyper-threading tbh :/ as unfortunate as it is for us with 6+ cores

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Sounds like a good little rig man

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This is my problem I haven't used Photoshop and have no personal APU experience. I've had GPU's since I started getting into pc's around 2002.

31

It serves me well, the MSI GTX 660 overclocks nicely.

http://thegametechnician.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=29

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I'm sure @Streetguru can help with APU's but honestly I used an i5 and no GPU for years for editing pro photos and never had much of a problem, of course now I would never go back from my beastly rendering rig but again I'm doing high end rendering and moving huge files and pixles around "basic work" should be fine.

But see what streetguru has to say on APU's

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nice little PC that mate, always liked that case...

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Thanks. I will read into it more as well. I just wanted to ask all you guys first as so many people here with so much varied experience.

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the difference between an i5 and the A8/A10 is where you want your performance

the i5 has a faster CPU

the APU has a faster GPU

and photoshop has some openCL/GL integration, and in anything that uses GPU acceleration the APU is going to beat out the i5 by a good amount despite the weaker CPU

Also you can like 3 displays off the APU

Plus it's half the cost so you get 1 TB of SSD storage vs 500gbs

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Thanks StreetGuru

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here is also some documentation on what photodshop uses GPU/ open CL to accelerate... see if any of it he will be using..?

https://forums.adobe.com/message/4289204

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Yes, a lot of software is heavily CPU laden, but GPU acceleration is increasingly an option.

I'm really a video guy but i can offer a little input. I used to do quite a lot of Photoshop work on my old gaming rig purely for convenience. It only had an i3-2120 and 4gb of RAM, but it handled everything fine (just as well as a quad core Xeon) and I could do fairly advanced work without ever being slowed down. But once I started tinkering with RAW images (.nef .dng etc.) i suffered a huge performance hit.

I would definitely consider if your friend will be working with raw data, and investigate solutions catered towards that. Also, unless someone else can give a compelling reason, more than 8gb of RAM sounds completely excessive.

Best of luck!

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That will be very useful, I will interrogate him tomorrow. I am expecting some blank expressions as I suspect he only does absolute basics. To be honest as a noob to PS some of that is meaningless to me too. "Puppet warp?!?" But this will help determine what route to follow.

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Thanks for that :-)