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Jville1956
Participant
February 21, 2023
Question

system requirements

  • February 21, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 9521 views

Hello, I will purchasing a PC laptop for home and wonder what system requirements I need to run only Adobe In Design. Thanks

 

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1 reply

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
February 21, 2023

There have been several discussions on this in recent weeks. You might do a quick search of the forum and review the arguments discussion. 🙂

 

Of the Adobe suite tools, though, InDesign is among the least demanding. It uses only one CPU core, so the number of cores you pay for will be more relevant to Photoshop, AfterEffects, Premiere and things like games. Any i7 CPU should be fine; one that's a little further up the power spectrum would not be money misspent. (That said, I am in the camp of buying at the "moderate" point on whatever the current CPU curve is; at the top of the peak, but not out on the leading edge where prices triple for power increases not generally proportional to cost.)

 

RAM is crucial. Most modern apps (and games) really demand 32GB for most purposes. 64GB is overkill unless you're going to work with very large Photoshop and AE projects. But 16GB won't really do it any more.

 

Fast SSDs are essential as well. HDDs are no longer a good buy except for bulk storage of things like video projects and archives. You want a fast SSD for boot, apps, scratch disks and working projects. A second SSD for project data files is a nice thing to have.

 

Video: almost any system with a name-brand video adapter (Nvidia or AMD) is good enough for InDesign. You will want the ability to drive an external 4K monitor, and (again) for the more power-hungry tools, a GPU that's up the curve will be a nice asset. InDesign does not use GPU acceleration (under Windows), but some of the other apps do. (Teh jump from no-GPU to modest-GPU is MUCH larger than from modest-GPU to mega-GPU, though, so don't go overboard unless you're going to dock into multiple desk monitors.)

 

Decent i7. 32GB RAM. Two SSDs with 2-4TB each. Decent name-brand (that means not "Intel Business Graphics" or some such) video adapter. At least one video port (DP or HDMI). That'll do ya.

 

J
Jville1956Author
Participant
February 21, 2023

This helps, thanks so much. And I'll search around in the Forum.

Deb

E
Community Expert
Eugene TysonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 21, 2023

Eugene, I don't disagree with any of what you've said, especially the conclusion. I build most of my systems to specs that would make all but a pro AAA gamer smile, and that's a good basis for any graphics-intensive use: publication, images, video, CAD. (And the occasional game. 🙂 )

 

But your first recommendation is off-target in that while nearly all modern CPUS are at least four-core, with eight being the median, I think... InDesign is resolutely a one-core app. It will take a MAJOR overhaul to go multi-core, so it's not going to happen with the next minor rev or two. So while it's neither here nor there, and most other apps (and games) will make glad use of those multiple cores... it's irrelevant to ID, and you can only scale up CPU power and cost so much to try and get better one-core app performance. So for ID, "almost any i7" is an adequate guideline. More money should only be put into the CPU for much, much more demanding apps, if any.

 

IMHVO. 🙂

 


Let me clarify that - sorry for the confusion.

 

Some tasks are multiple threads, like exporting a document, or generating PDFs.

 

But overall, layout, formatting, rendering text and images etc. are primarily handled by a single CPU core.

 

Adobe has made efforts to optimize InDesign for modern CPUs and operating systems, and the software does make use of multiple cores for some tasks.

 

When you opt for a lower cpu in buying you're likely opting to buy lower specs for other components, like RAM and graphics card - unless you're building for yourself - and if you're building for yourself you're not going to be asking here.

 

Who knows how Adobe are improving the software and maybe multicore support will be beneficial in 3 or 5 or 6 years time. 

Longevity is key to buying a computer. 

 

I apologise for the confusion. Hope that clarifies my reasoning and my opinion.

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