Choosing a New Computer for Photo Editing

Andy    January 29, 2021

At our Tutorial night on the 28th January Andy Hyde gave an interesting presentation talking about the decisions he made when looking to replace his computer.

During his presentation Andy described how he choose the various components that make up a computer to give the best performance possible without needing an unlimited budget.

Some of the key points of the presentation were;

  • PhotoShop and LightRoom aren’t good at parallel processing, therefore you should chose a CPU with a faster clock speed over one with many cores.
  • Fast drives are one of the easiest ways to improve the speed of your computer, SSD are up to 10X faster than mechanical disks but the new m2.NVMe drives can 6X faster than that.
  • PhotoShop benefits from having an exclusive scratch disk.
  • A generous amount of RAM will help you computer run well especially when working with large RAW files and multiple layers in PhotoShop
  • Effective cooling for both the CPU and case will help you computer run virtually silently and be more reliable

Here are the details of the components Andy chose

Case: Be Quiet! Pure Base 600 Black ATX Case
CPU: Intel Core i5-9600K 3.7Ghz 6 Core CPU, 6 Thread, 4.6GHz Turbo
Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC ATX Motherboard with USB Type-C
Graphics Card : NVidia GeForce GTX 1660 6GB GDDR5 GPU
Memory: 32GB DDR4 2666MHz Memory (2x16GB)
Primary Storage Drive: 256GB ADATA SX8200 PRO M.2 NVMe (3500MB/R, 1200MB/W) – 6x faster than SATA SSD
Secondary Storage Drive: 512GB ADATA SX8200 PRO M.2 NVMe (3500MB/R, 2300MB/W) – 6x faster than SATA SSD
Third Storage Drive: 4TB Seagate BarraCuda 3.5″ Hard Drive
CPU Cooling: Be Quiet Pure Rock low noise CPU air cooler
PSU: Contour 650W High Efficiency ATX PSU
WiFi: Built in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with the Motherboard
Optical Bay: 24x SATA Internal DVDRW with M-Disk Support (ASUS DRW-24D5MT) Black
Sound Card: Integrated Sound Card On The Motherboard
Additional PCIe Card: 2 x USB 3.0 PCI slot bracket
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64 Bit

Andy ordered his computer from Punch Technologies

Learn more about Punch Technologies Photo-editing computers here Best Photography Computer Entry to Pro | Photo Editing Desktop Computers (punchtechnology.co.uk)

Here are some of the slides from Andy’s presentation