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Participant
February 12, 2025
Question

Dell XPS Desktop for Photoshop

  • February 12, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 266 views

Hi, I'm reaching out again for advice on purchasing a new computer. Previously I was looking at laptops but think it would be best to go with a desktop. 
For my price range I'm considering the below, ideally I would go for 32GB DDR5 but it takes me over budget. 
I'll be using Photoshop the majority of the time with files 1-2GB in size for my artwork - original watercolour paintings then worked in photoshop. 
Do you think it would be ok? Any feedback would be very much appreciated. Thanks

Dell XPS Desktop

Model: 8960

14th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 14700 (33 MB cache, 20 Cores, 28 threads, up to 5.4 GHz)

Windows 11 Home,

NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060, 8 GB GDDR6

16GB DDR5, 2x8GB, 5600MT/s

1 TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD

1 reply

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 12, 2025

I suppose it was me who discouraged you... 😉

 

Sorry about that, and I probably gave the incorrect impression that all laptops will cause problems. They obviously don't, or we'd be flooded here. Still, there's no getting around the hard fact that 95% of all problems we see here are on laptops.

 

If you really need the portability, you obviously have no choice. So what I really mean is, optimize the odds if you can. Research as much as possible, look for people who actually have used Photoshop on a certain model.

 

Anyway. The specs.

 

I'd go for 32 GB RAM. This isn't really critical as long as you have enough disk space, but 16 is borderline these days.

 

Which brings me to the second point. Photoshop uses huge amounts of memory, much more than any RAM you may have. So while working, temporary working data are written to disk. This is what's known as the scratch disk. Think of the scratch disk as Photoshop's main memory, with RAM as a cache holding the most current data. You should normally have 150 - 500 GB free space for the scratch disk, depending on file sizes, how many files are open, and number of history states.

 

This means you should also consider a bigger NVMe. 2 TB is more comfortable.

 

Nvidia RTX 4060 is rock solid. But again, while 8 GB VRAM will work, 12 is safer.

 

The CPU is fine.

 

The specs you listed will work, but a little more goes a long way here 🙂

 

Participant
February 13, 2025

Thanks again for your advice. It was partly your comment, aswell as others I've spoken to.