Looking for new PC recommendations

Question

My wife is a textile designer and is a heavy Adobe Photoshop and illustrator user. The PC she's using was meant to be a replacement for me but hers died so I gave her my new XPS. It didn't have anything super high in performance, it was just meant to be a replacement gaming PC.

Unfortunately, is not able to keep up, resource wise, with the multiple drawings and everything else she has open. The PC will start lagging and it take a while the programs to respond and to save files.

What I'm looking for is recommendations on what other textile designers use, not just the stats off the software page. I can build a high end XPS but it's going to be expensive. I know it needs to have a SSD drive, that will help it with running the software as well as saving and retrieving files. I would go with an i9 processor, no point on buying anything lower. I don't think 32gb RAM is enough so I would go with at least 64gb or more if the system could handle it. For graphics card the nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 with 24gb GDDR6X. The one thing I don't like about these high end XPS's is they use a closed liquid cooling system instead of fans. I know it's safe to use, I guess I'm old school and just don't like the thought of liquid inside my PC.

Any textile designers or other designers that are heavily using photoshop/illustrator that could recommend a make/model that they're using would be greatly appreciated. TYIA

D Fosse · Answer

i9 is overkill for Photoshop, there is no point. An i7 (or even i5) will be more than enugh. For Lightroom it might make more sense. In any case, most of the heavy computing these days is done in the GPU, not the CPU. Most of the new AI-based functions run exclusively in the GPU, they don't even touch the CPU.

In later years, the GPU has emerged as the absolutely most critical hardware component.

But an RTX 4090 might still be considered overkill unless you do extensive 3D work in other specialized software. It would pay off in Photoshop in the sense that it would perform those AI operations extremely fast - but a 4060 or 4070 would also work very well.

In short - if you have bad performance and lagging, it's for other reasons than hardware specifications.

Lack of sufficient scratch disk space will slow Photoshop down and eventually bring it to a full halt when it runs out. This is very often overlooked! For any serious work, you should have around 500 GB and upwards free space. RAM isn't nearly as important. Photoshop is hugely I/O-intensive, and it normally requires a lot more memory than any RAM installed. This is what the scratch disk is for. In Photoshop, there is no such thing as "enough RAM" anyway - it's handled by the scratch disk.

It should also be said that Dell is notorious for filling their machines up with all kinds of extra "helpful" utilities and software - sometimes to the point where it's difficult to find the original operating system at all. I'd consider it highest priorities to clean all this out. A lot of this causes nothing but problems. Remove, uninstall, disable as much as possible of it. Get as close to a basic Windows install as you can.

The best way to get a reliable and efficient machine that never fails, is to build it yourself. That's the only way to avoid all the overhead that vendors add just to put their own stamp on the product.

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