Best CPU for Photoshop?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 17, 2025
3 replies
9296 views

I'm planning to buy a PC primarily for Photoshop and Lightroom, along with some video editing using After Effects and Premiere Pro. I need it to be powerful enough to handle the latest versions of these programs smoothly for several years.

I have an option to choose between Ryzen 7 7700X, Intel Core i7-14700F and Intel Core i9-14900KF. What would you recommend? I'm currently leaning towards Intel Core i9-14900KF but I've read about some crashes/issues so I would like to be sure it is actually the best option.

The other specs would be these:

RAM: 64 GB
HDD: 2 TB
SSD: 2 TB M.2 NVME
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce RTX4070 SUPER
Graphics Card Memory: 12 GB GDDR6X

Windows

D Fosse

Community Expert

Go Intel, not AMD.

Statistically, we see a lot more problems here on AMD systems. That's not because they make "bad" product - it's because AMD's market is gaming. That's where they direct all their efforts, and that doesn't always play well with Photoshop and graphics applications.

Don't worry too much about benchmarks. Any decent CPU will be fast enough for Photoshop. The fact is, Photoshop is not very CPU intensive. The GPU is much more important, along with a fast high capacity disk setup.

You want components that work together, in a balanced system. That's the main priority. It usually pays to pick components that have been on the market for six months or so, then the wrinkles will have been ironed out.

ultrachrome

Inspiring

I don't mean to challenge you but we're looking into a new custom built computer too and most of what I've been seeing is the the current version of Photoshop isn't very GPU intensive and the CPU is what matters. Me watching my status monitor of my GPU and CPU bears this out. Can you elaborate please?

D Fosse

Community Expert

You can't measure this by percentages. Obviously the CPU does a lot of the basic workload, but mostly routine tasks that have been around forever.

The point is that the GPU does most of the advanced stuff. The development focus is on the GPU these days, and new features have been mostly GPU-resident in recent years. It's critical that the GPU is capable of performing all these advanced functions, and do so reliably. If the GPU malfunctions, the whole application performs badly.

Ten-fifteen years ago it was true that Photoshop wasn't very GPU-intensive. Things are very different now. It's also true that Photoshop doesn't need a lot of raw GPU number-crunching power a such. There's no need for an RTX 4090, a 4060 will do just fine. But it still has to perform a wide range of very advanced functions.