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henryh888123
Participant
Feb 20, 2025 3:29 AM UTC
Question

I need suggestions to upgrade tower computer for win 11, will be using a 2TB external SSD

Hobby photographer, I would appreciate suggestions for a Windows PC tower. Will be using 2 TB external SSD for image storage. Looking for efficient graphics management and good graphics card. Suggestions?

4 replies

Participant
Feb 20, 2025 12:55 PM UTC

See https://www.pugetsystems.com/ for advice with respect to Lightroom and Photoshop.

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dj_paige
Legend
Feb 20, 2025 10:57 AM UTC

Recommendation: fast GPU and fast CPU. As fast as you can afford. For LrC, you don't really need more than 32GB RAM, but if you will be doing other things on this computer, perhaps you do need more than 32GB, it depends.

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Community Expert
Feb 20, 2025 5:22 AM UTC

Your question is impossible without some sort of budget.  And, there are lots of opinions!   

 

My list of basic priorities is:

 

Intel i7 or i9 for the processor

32GB or more for RAM

GPU made by NVIDIA

1 TB or more, solid state drive (SSD) 

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Community Expert
Feb 20, 2025 7:39 AM UTC

For the GPU I would prefer NVidia's RTX 30xx or 40xx. 

I'm using the RTX 3060 and it worked very well with LR and PS. This card does have a good price/performance ratio. 

If you want even more performance buy the RTX 4070/RTX 4090 or the new RTX 50 series. 

 

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My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 26H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 9 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI