Adobe graphic design machine

[R3aL1Ty]

Hi all,

My wife is need of a new machine potentially.
She does graphic design freelance and has over the last few months picked up more work.

She is beginning to find her machine is really beginning to struggle and I have seen this with her machine.

Current system:
Auros B450 pro
16GB DDR4 3200
Ryzen 3400g
No GPU

She uses the Adobe Suite, main applications:
Photoshop
Illustrator - This seems to be the heaviest use case and causes noticeable stutter and machine freezes.

She has been interested in a MAC and I am fairly confident we could get a better laptop instead, but I am not 100% sure what would be the best case here.
She's been looking at the Mac book Air more recently.
She definitely wants a laptop too

Any advice around what I should be looking into?

 

[R3aL1Ty]

I would be inclined to say get a Mac for this sort of usage tbh. Could have a look at the Dell XPS range also but. Great machines.

Thank you,

Is there any reason a MAC would do whats required?
Also RAM requirements, is there a minimum i should be looking for?

 

[R3aL1Ty]

Macbook Air would be a good choice. I use a MBP M1 Max for video editing and motion graphics and it's equally as capable as my 5800X/3080.

Portability is of course excellent, battery life seriously impressive.

I am likely going to go for the Air, the portability is the biggest thing my wife wants out of besides stability.
So definitely what i am leaning towards, thanks !

 

[R3aL1Ty]

You could upgrade that a lot, e.g.

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x AMD Ryzen 5 5600 Six Core 4.4GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-3D2-AM) = £149.99
• 1 x MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X OC 12GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card (SKU: GX-374-MS) = £278.99

Total: £436.97 (includes delivery: £7.99)​

Would be some 40% faster in single thread and over double the multi thread performance.

3060 is very popular for creators and should help out with any of the newer GPU accelerated features.

This was along the lines of what I was thinking personally, but my wife has two arguements.
This is 50% of the price of a laptop (the Air is about 1k +-)

And she does not get the portability but I am glad to know this is definitely an option, so thank you!

 

[R3aL1Ty]

Mac is certainly the choice of the vast majority of graphic designers

I think this is what she is going to do as well.
Above all else, she seems to have convinced herself that this is what she needs.

At this point no talking her out of it xD

 

[R3aL1Ty]

Women are always right. Even if they have no understanding of these things Buy the Mac or face hell lol

pretty much exactly that at this point