New Machines for photoshop at work

drogon

drogon

drogon

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10 Dec 2009
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Scotland, Edinburgh
Hi all,

the IT department have asked for our input on the computers for our department. We need the machines for photoshop work.

Budget would be c. 28k for 5 machines 5 monitors and a laptop.

IT recommended the following
X 5 EIZO ColorEdge CG2730 27 inch IPS (Monitor)

Mobile Precision 7760
0
(Laptop)

11th Generation Intel® Core™ i9-11950H, vPro® (24MB, 8 core, 16 thread, 2.60 to 5.00 GHz Turbo, 45W)

NVIDIA® RTX™ A4000, 8 GB GDDR6

16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR4, 3200 MHz

512 GB, M.2 2280, Gen3 PCIe x4 NVMe, SSD, Class 40



Precision 5820 Tower (Workstation)

Intel® Xeon® W-2235 (8.25 MB cache, 6 cores, 12 threads, 3.80 GHz to 4.60 GHz Turbo, 130 W)

NVIDIA® RTX™ A5000, 24 GB GDDR6, 4 DP

32 GB, 2 x 16 GB, DDR4, 2933 MHz, ECC

M.2 512GB PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive

Precision 5820 Tower 950W PCIe FB XFIO Chassis CL
Click to expand...


I was wondering if anyone with more knowledge could give me some input.

The machines have to remain relevant for the next 3 Years.
 
Disclaimer: I don't use Photoshop personally, just read about hardware for it in the past.

Guess the laptop's not worth arguing about too much because there's only one, and the screens look like they're reasonable. Taking those away from the budget leaves about £3.5k per workstation.

The GPU choice probably depends a bit on the type of work - if they're going to be used for very complex work with loads of layers and constantly doing gpu accelerated tasks then 24GB vram and the processing power might actually be necessary. If projects tend to only be moderately complicated I think even something like an RTX A2000 would be more than enough for most projects I think. Consumer gpus such as an RTX 3060Ti would be fine for most things too.

I'd question the benefit of Xeons too. Something like an i7 12700 or even an i5 12400 would perform much better in general, unless any of the extra Xeon features are needed for some reason.

In general Photoshop is more about CPU, RAM, and storage than GPU power.

I think most nvme drives would be fine, but these days it might as well be pcie gen 4 if only 500gb local storage is needed (I think the quoted 'class 40' drive will be gen 3 though)

If the above saved some money then you might be able to shell out on some 4k 32" monitors (probably not 5 of them though, depending on the requirements for colour accuracy etc), which might be more useful day to day.

32GB RAM seems like a good choice to cover most workloads, unless projects tend to be extremely complex in which case more might be useful.

Fundamentally you'll probably be limited in choice by what your IT department's preferred supplier presents to them though.

Anyway those are my thoughts, hopefully someone that actually know what they're talking about can input too :p
 
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I think you should get one of the desktops and test it. I don’t know whether it’s overkill or not - it depends upon how much GPU acceleration you need. I also think that the local storage seems low. You should have a separate drive for data, scratch files etc.
 
Yea I was thinking the Xeons in this case were a bad call. I'll relay some of the info to the IT department. I suppose it depends on what other options we have. I'll keep the thread updated but thanks for your input guys.
 
drogon said:
I was wondering if anyone with more knowledge could give me some input.

The machines have to remain relevant for the next 3 Years
Click to expand...

Those Xeon's are dog turd to be brutally honest you want Alder Lake based systems, 12700K or 12900K, EEC RAM is not massively important for Photoshop work that is regularly saved and doesn't have massive rendering times that could be lost, DDR5 on Alder Lake gives a huge boost to the performance. If working in in full 10-bit colour (30-bit Photoshop setting) you can still use a standard card and the NVidia Studio driver, so anything from an RTX 3070 (Ti) up to a 3090 would be better than the Quadro as they is little to no performance over the standard desktop counterpart.

If you want a more detailed specification let me know. :)

EDIT: The money saved on the system can go to a better and bigger monitor that supports 4K or even 8K, with the same colour accuracy. I configured some systems wit the Dell UltraSharp UP3218K (8K monitor) not too long ago, and they are pretty amazing, if they need a hood you can buy them as an addon.

A monitor investment is much better longer term, as you say the systems only need last 3-years but a 1440p monitor is pretty meh for professional work these days, and it 3-years it'll be a fossil.
 
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