New PC spec - primary use photoshop/lightroom

Hodders

Hodders

Hodders

Soldato
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Subject says it all really. Can someone suggest a good mobo/cpu/ram combo for photoshop/lightroom.

I have a 64bit copy of Win7, a 64GB SSD and a Radeon 9800 in my current rig but I haven't been following hardware for the last few years and so I don't really know where the sweet-spots are. Budget is limited so no daft specs I'd rather have 80% of the performance at 50% of the price rather than the latest, fastest CPU if you know what I mean.

Also given I shoot with a 5D2 and therefore have large images will 16GB be any better than 8GB in everyday use (2 or 3 images open in PS at once) ?

Cheers.
 
Confused said:
Core i5-2500k
Minimum of 8gb DDR3
Z68 motherboard
Click to expand...

This really. 16GB of ram you may as well as it's just offensively cheap and it's not going to hinder performance. The i5 2500k is a fantastic PS chip, especially if you fancy overclocking it.

I would recommend keeping the SSD as your boot drive rather than having a mechanical boot drive and the SSD for scratch. Reason being it helps the whole system run faster, and with 16GB of ram the speed of the scratch won't matter so much unless you're dealing with mega composites etc. You just get the best of all worlds :)
 
I've stuck 16GB in my new PC. Given OCuk have done a Kingston 8GB kit (2x4GB) for under £50, 16GB is easily achieved.
 
Memory wise I'd echo min of 8, although lr3 and ps cs3 will easily use over that combined when open together.

Processor wise I found lr quite processor intensive with my old q9550 circa using 80% while rendering, moving between and processing images. These days the i7-2600k makes it a breeze but I don't see why the i5 shouldn't handle the job well.
 
If you're using Photoshop and not Lightroom, ditch that 9800 Pro and get a modern Nvidia card in there. It will be used to speed up some Photoshop processes.

At present I don't believe Lightroom 3 uses either make of graphics card to accelerate.
 
isnt the graphics card acceleration only useful for rendering though and not actual processing? been a while since i read about it but i think thats what it was.
 
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