How to determine PC specs for running Photoshop?

Question

Is there anyway to determine how powerful a PC you need to run Photoshop for your needs? I keep upgrading my laptop with more RAM and SSD, and Photoshop is still slow as molasses. I'm at the end of my rope. Maybe I need a desktop and not a laptop, but with what I've been through I need to stop assuming that "bigger is better" and know HOW big - more or less precisely. How does one determine what kind of specs to buy for their particular needs? Here's mine in a nutshell:

I work with huge files created from panoramas; I have layers that I turn into Smart Objects and then often use Puppet Warp and other filters. A file I am currently working with is 7 GB and that's not atypical.

I bought a Dell gaming laptop a month ago - my 6 yr. old Toshiba laptop just wasn't cutting it. The Dell had an iCore 7 processor and a 256 GB SSD, 1 TB HD and 16 GB of RAM. It worked well for a few weeks but then I started noticing slowness. It started taking hours to render and save files. So I replaced the SSD with a 1 TB SSD and added 16 GM more RAM for a total of 32 RAM. I just got back the computer this evening and turned a layer into a Smart Object a half hour ago and it's still processing.

When I bring up the Task Manager I see the following. I don't know how to read this exactly but in the Memory column is that 66% being used by Photoshop? This is the same kind of readings I was getting before I upgraded from the 16 GB of RAM and 256 SSD. Photoshop is still eating up the same amount of RAM as it was before. Why is this? What do I need to do or know to run Photoshop with sane and reasonable response and processing times?

D Fosse · Answer

You basically don't need a powerful computer. What you need is disk bandwidth.

In Photoshop most of the action is moving data in and out of the scratch disk. You may have a lot of RAM, but there is no such thing as enough RAM in Photoshop. The scratch disk is the beginning and end of everything (well, almost everything).

If things are moving slowly (and you have a good scratch disk setup), the prime suspects are drivers and third-party plugins. Usually it's the video driver. Try to update that first. One absolute show-stopper is dual video cards, increasingly popular in laptops. But Photoshop has big problems with that, and you should find a way to disable one of them.

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