Hello, I need help on building a new computer. Which specs would you reccomend me?

Report · Apr 12, 2020

Hi community, I'm new here and also at Adobe Products, I started my Graphic Design studies and I need help on building a new computer. As long as I live in Brazil, computer parts are way expensive and I can't afford for the moment high-end components and also I don't think they would be useful, because I'm not rendering a hour lenght 4K video or working on heavy archives, but also I don't wanna build a pc that would be outdated on next 2 or 3 years, once I'll be learning from photo capture to 3D modelling (upgrades will be necessary, I think).

For now, I am going for 16GB RAM, 500GB ssd plus 1TB HDD.

I've been looking for Intel i5-9400 F, Ryzen 5 1600X or Ryzen 5 2600 and for GPU, Radeon RX570 and GTX 1050Ti, but If i get a integrated graphics such as Ryzen 5 3400G will it be enough? I've seen it has less cores than others I mentioned, but I don't know the real impact of the cores during the processes, if it is really necessary to have, like, 6 or 8 cores.

I'm not very acquainted to hardware specs, and everywhere I look, the reviews and the general content are about gaming or specific rendering that require a lot, but I'm not there yet. Said that, which CPU and GPU would you reccomend me? Is Intel better than AMD? A Radeon GPU is enough or should I get an GeForce?

Report · Apr 15, 2020

My honest opinion:

Go for a Ryzen 5 2600. The permanent disabling of the integrated graphics in all of Intel's F-series CPUs completely defeats the biggest reason these days to buy a new mainstream Intel CPU-based system: QuickSync. You cannot have QuickSync hardware decoding/encoding if you don't have integrated graphics on an Intel CPU. Without QuickSync, that i5-9400F would have produced an overall performance result that's almost at the same level as a three-year-old Intel quad-core i7-7700K CPU. Not what you want in a more modern system.

As for the GPU, see if you can find a GTX 1650 SUPER for around the same price or just a little higher than either of your planned GPU choices. That will be the best match for your planned CPU, given your budget.

And I do not recommend a Ryzen 5 3400G at all because it has fewer cores than your planned choices, and my own performance testing has shown that quad-core CPUs (even with hyperthreading) had their day years ago and are not recommended at all for even a budget video editing PC that ends up costing you the same amount of money overall as a PC that's based on the 6-core CPUs that you mentioned. As a matter of fact, the R5 3400G is not a Zen2 architecture at all - but is instead based on the very same Zen+ architecture as the R5 2600. And I have seen PugetBench for Premiere Pro results on a Ryzen 3 3200G (4 cores and 4 threads) with 16 GB of RAM, and that system turned out to be the absolute worst-performing system of all PCs submitted to its online results site that used recent-generation CPU platforms (only an 11-year-old Intel i7-860 system with 8 GB of RAM and an unknown ATi Radeon HD 5800 series GPU did worse than that R3 3200G).

Randall