Long term desktop configuration for digital painting art

Hi

Just a couple of comments to add :

1. Multiple screens work well in Photoshop but make sure you run then from a single GPU card. Photoshop does not play nicely with multiple GPUs.

2. Allow something in your budget for a hardware device to calibrate and profile your screen. The best screen in the world is still only as good as its profile.

Dave

I recently upgraded my six year old i7-3930K system that had 32Gb RAM, and a GTX970.  I spent a lot of money on the new system, which comprises an i9-7900X, 64Gb DDR4 memory, two 500Gb, NVMe drives, and I retained the GTX970.   I bumped several SSDs from the old system.

The new system feels snappy, and the 64Gb RAM has meant that I am less likely to use the Scratch space, but for a lot of things, I am seeing absolutely no advantage with the new system, because Photoshop does not use a lot of CPU cores and threads for most of its functions.  That means that CPU clock speed is more important than having 18 cores and 32 threads for most of what Photoshop does, and that the i7-8700K will tend to out perform my 7900X despite the latter costing three times as much, plus the motherboard for the 7900X will be more expensive than that for 8700K

Where the 8700K falls down, is its lack of PCIe lanes.  That means if you intend using multiple GPUs (not a good idea with Photoshop) or a lot of high end drives, you'll run short of lanes.

Check out the articles on Puget Systems for some real world test results with various content creation software and platforms.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Puget-Systems-Adobe-Photoshop-CC-Benchmark-1132/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2017-1-1-CPU-Performance-Core-i7-8700K-i5-8600K-i3-8350K-1057/

There are heaps more articles, and they are as good as they come.

You can also ask this question at the PC forum of the Digital Photography Review website where these hardware recommendations come up frequently.

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/1004http://

aidamilja  wrote I am thinking of buying a 4K 24 inches EIZO screen

Great choice

I just invested in a new monitor to replace a five-year old CX240. Not that it doesn't work perfectly, but I'd like a little more pixels to work with. I wrestled for a long time with myself over the 4K CG248 vs. the new CG2730 at 2560x1440.

It was an extremely close call, but in the end I settled for the 27, arriving any day now. I don't really need 4K. If I decide otherwise later on...well, I better not

Upside is I can take the CX to work and put it beside the CG246 there. They should make a nice couple.

PS. The budget for the configuration does not include the screen.