This comp good enough for photoshop?

Ispheria

Topic.

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My friend knows nothing about computers and asked me to help her pick one out to use photoshop on, cause she's a photographer, but her budget is like, nothing. She'd rather spend her money on a really nice screen and stuff. I was like, it'll probably be cheaper to just build a computer but then I was like, wait, I know nothing about photoshop and I've never built a cheap system. So I figure it would be less of a hassle to just buy a computer, since she won't be spending much anyways.

This is the cheapest one I can find with a quad core processor at over 3.0 GHz, 8 gb of ram, and an SD card reader, which I think would be good enough for just photoshop, but I'm not too sure since I don't use it myself.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Doyen

That'll be fine, you can make it a little nicer buy buying an SSD to set as Photoshop's scratch disk.

ZacD

Might want to throw in a cheap GPU in, Photoshop has had GPU acceleration for a while. I'd be tempted to try building a better system myself.

EarthQuake

Yes, this will be fine, though an SSD helps quite a bit for lightroom if you're processing a lot of photos.

ZacD wrote: »

Might want to throw in a cheap GPU in, Photoshop has had GPU acceleration for a while. I'd be tempted to try building a better system myself.

Not a terrible idea but not really a big need either. Photo processing in PS isn't really going to stress a gpu, and lightroom isn't even gpu accelerated. I do pretty much all my photo processing on a laptop with mobil intel gpu and there isn't much difference in performance compared to my workstation with beefcake gpu.

Cpu and disk speed is more of the limiting factor. Even then, thats mostly loading and saving large raw files or HDR tiffs, or switching through huge collections of raw files in lightroom. The only area my laptop starts chug is when editing 12x6k 32bit HDR files, that can get a bit slow, not sure if that is mostly on gpu or cpu though as I have a dual core i5.

Ispheria

Ok cool, thanks guys. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just upgrade the ram to 16gb than to buy an SSD to use as a scratch disk though? Or would that not be enough for photographers and I might as well just buy the SSD?

I've already told her that she might want to buy a cheap graphics card too for the hardware acceleration, but she was like, if I ever feel like I need it than I'll ask you for help again, and I was like, ok. She's used to using this at school. (the 3.1 GHz specs)
http://www.engadget.com/products/apple/imac/27-inch/mid-2011/specs/

ZacD

I'd pick 128-250gb SSD over 16gb of ram for photography. Raw photos can get pretty large and slow to move around and open, being able to open Photoshop in a few seconds is really nice, and a photographer shouldn't be making massive PSD files like video game artists do.

Ispheria

ZacD wrote: »

I'd pick 128-250gb SSD over 16gb of ram for photography. Raw photos can get pretty large and slow to move around and open, being able to open Photoshop in a few seconds is really nice, and a photographer shouldn't be making massive PSD files like video game artists do.

Alright cool, thanks for the info. I checked prices, and it turns out small SSD's are actually cheaper than 16GB of ram lol would it be worth the upgrade to 16GB of ram later down the line or should she get a better cpu first?

Sorry for all the questions. I've never had to deal with upgrading a low end rig before.