recommendations for PC for extensive photoshop work

[Dominic Deacon]

It’s hard to find hard facts about what’s most important so this is just my observations about what seems to work. First I would have thought a 2 year old dell i5 would still be solid. If it’s a laptop I suppose it’s a dual core rather than a quad. I think for photoshop you really need a quad which is expensive in a laptop. Very doable for a decent price on a desktop though.

I wouldn’t worry about a graphics card. I didn’t notice a huge difference when I dropped a gtx970 into my system over the integrated graphics on the processor. Photoshop uses a lot of RAM. 16gbs is probably a good amount. I get by with it anyway.

I would think you could put together a desktop with a new i7, a decent SSD and 16gb of ddr4 RAM for under a grand and that should hold you for a good long while.

[Rick Wise]

Many thanks for getting back to me. I do have a quad desktop. But you may have identified the real problem: only 8 GB of RAM. So maybe it’s worth it to upgrade to 16 BG, rather than buy a whole new computer, much as I think I’d prefer an i7. Perhaps that’s not so important. This i5 is rated at 3.0 GHS.

I’m pretty sure there are only two RAM slots, or else there are 4 but currently filled with 2 GB each, so I’d have to throw away what I have, or so I think without really knowing….

The system is 64-bit.

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
MFA/BFA Lighting and Camera Instructor Academy of Art University
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Dominic Deacon]

Your specs as far as you’ve outlined them sound fine. Obviously more is always better but what you have sounds like enough for a smooth edit unless you are creating unusually big projects.

I doubt RAM would be the bottleneck unless it’s slowing down as you go. 8GB should be ample to be running a lot of layers before the RAM fills up and you start seeing slow down. You can check if you’re RAMs full while your working quite easily. A quick google will show you how if you don’t already know how to do this.

Definitely no expert on this sort of thing but I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue is not hardware related at all.

[Katryna Sleptzoff]

I would go with this as the most likely problem as well. Check your task manager and see if there is a program using up a lot of your ram….8gb should be more than enough for photoshop. I’ve personally been using my 10 year old dell computer up until very recently when I upgraded and it worked fine in photoshop.

You can also allocate the amount of memory photoshop uses as well, in your preferences, under “performance”. Check that and see if allocating more memory helps. There are also some more advanced options for graphics processing as well, but you’d be better off googling it since I don’t know as much about it.

But like Dominic said, wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t a hardware issue at all. A two year old computer should be just fine running ps, unless your projects are ridiculously large, or you have other programs running in the background hogging up your memory.

Hope this helps!