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Participant
July 28, 2024
Question

Laptop HP ZBook G6

  • July 28, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 531 views

Hello. I'm a Photographer and I use LrC and PS. I'm buying a laptop because I'm more or less on go. Found this one used and it's great that I can add more RAM and SSD but don't know if capabilities will run my software... Help please...

 

HP Zbook 17 G6

i7-9850H

32Gb DDR

512GB SSD

RTX3000

 

Thank you

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1 reply

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 28, 2024

Is RTX 3000 a typo? The series begins with 3050 (low end) to 3090 (high end). The span is considerable, but generally, 3050 is adequate, 3060 works very well, and anything above mostly overkill.

 

A very common problem with laptops is dual graphics. That sounds like a good idea, but Photoshop (and ACR/Lightroom) uses the GPU for actual data processing - it's not a simple one-way downstream flow like it traditionally has been. You can't send data to one GPU and get it back from the other, so there can only be one GPU in this equation. In short, dual GPUs tend to conflict, cause crashing and so on. You may need to completely disable the integrated GPU.

 

In addition, you may quickly get a disk space problem with a system drive of only 512 GB. Raster image editing requires huge memory I/O - much more than any RAM you may have installed. So Photoshop writes temporary working data to disk. This is what is known as the Photoshop scratch disk. For efficient operation, you'll need at least 250 GB free space for the scratch disk, sometimes more. I normally recommend 500 GB.

 

A third potential concern with laptops, is that the vendors tend to put all kinds of "helpful" software on top of the operating system. This is their chance to put their stamp on the product. The problem is that it tends to get in the way of advanced software like Photoshop. It usually pays to uninstall and disable as much as possible of it.

Participant
July 28, 2024

About RTX I  don't know this is how it's descrined on the website of the laptop. May only concern is the CPU because this laptop is made so you can actually upgrade RAM and SSD alone. It also has monitor calibration this why I'm considering...