Hello everyone! I'm helping a friend of mine build a PC for his wife to do graphic design with. She uses mostly Illustrator, but also photoshop, probably a 65/35 split. They are a young family so their budget is super tight, so a quality system under $500 is critical, but less would be even better.The emphasis for this build is price to performance, and getting good enough user experience. As a secondary goal, I would like to leave them good upgrade paths for future hardware. I've built a few systems before, but I just don't know what kind of workload Illustrator and Photoshop are! So I need your help. I've found a lot of conflicting opinions and need a few things cleared up. Does Illustrator or photoshop scale well to multiple cores? Are they GPU accelerated, if so how well does this scale with higher quality GPUs? Can a quality integrated GPU like the Vega 8 or Vega 11 on the 2200g and 2400g do GPU acceleration or does it require a discrete GPU? Are the QUADRO GPUs much better for this workload? Is 8gb of RAM enough, or is 16gb necessary? Does running multiple monitors, or higher resolutions put more load on the system? We already managed to find a 256gb NVMe SSD, so the boot drive and scratch disk are taken care of. I've also got a spare PSU for them to use. Below are some builds that I've thrown together, let me know what you think of them. Option 1: $520 CPU: Ryzen R5 2600 (6 core, 12 thread) RAM: 16 gb DDR4 3000 mhz. GPU: GTX 970 (there is a used one in my area for less than a 1050 ti) Motherboard: ASRock AB350 Pro. SSD: 256gb 960 EVO Option 2: $403 CPU/GPU: R5 2400g (4core, 8 thread, VEGA 11 iGPU) RAM: 16 gb DDR4 3000 mhz. motherboard: ASRock AB350 Pro. SSD: 256 gb 960 EVO Option 3: $261 CPU/GPU: R5 2200g (4 core, 4 thread, VEGA 8 iGPU) RAM: 8 gb DDR4 3000 mhz. motherboard: ASRock AB350 Pro. SSD: 256 gb 960 EVO Of these systems would they all deliver a similar experience, or does one stand out as superior?
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