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fabbui
fabbui
Inspiring
November 8, 2021
Question

Optimal Desktop specs for 2022?

  • November 8, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 354 views

I am sorry that this is a very repeated question. I could not find the right answers. I am considering a custom desktop for ps/Lightroom/camera raw 2022. 

I currently work on a 2 year old Lenovo desktop with 32 gb ram. My photos are 45mpx. I am trying to go into fantasy images which means multiple layers, several photos for compositing. And running filters, actions, effects. I do a lot of selections. Sometimes it lags for several reasons. 

I had seen the minimum specs which is NOT my question. If I wanted to build a great pc for this. What would I need to consider?  I am asking b/c I had seen contradictory information. For example, does PS take advantage of multiple cores?  Some articles say it does while others say it does not. Or how much ram is PS capable of using.  

I am lookin into processor rayzen 7 5800x which is 8 core. Ssd for OS and PS software and possibly the scratch disk. Asus Radeon graphics card with 12GB

maybe 64 in ram?   

I know it is a bit overkill. Anything of the above would be a waste because it woul not be used at all by PS?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

D Fosse
Community Expert
D FosseCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 8, 2021

I'd be a bit careful with Ryzen for now. We've seen quite a bit of performance problems on that platform - not all of them, but more than we see with Intel. Yes, Photoshop will use all available cores, but some functions don't benefit much from multithreading. Like the old joke about two women giving birth to a baby in 4.5 months. Generally, Photoshop is more bandwidth-limited than CPU-limited.

 

Lightroom, however, relies much more on the CPU.

 

As for working with big files, two words: scratch disk. That's where the heavy lifting is. There's no such thing as "enough RAM" no matter how much you have, so the real bottleneck is the scratch disk. Plan for at least a 1TB NVMe (aka PCIe M.2) system drive, or a second NVMe to use exclusively as scratch disk. You'll want to have 500 GB - 1 TB free space.

 

Get a decent video card, and think future-proof. This is where the most rapid development is. A Nvidia 1660 or up should perform well.

    fabbui
    fabbuiAuthor
    Inspiring
    November 8, 2021

    Thanks for the input. Do you happen to know if the issues with ryzen are going to be resolved? (Being worked)

    D Fosse
    Community Expert
    D FosseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 8, 2021

    You can be sure they're working on it. Note that this is just my personal impression from watching these forums, not an "official" position. But it has been commented on by others too.

      kglad
      Community Expert
      kgladCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      November 8, 2021

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