PC Specs

[Aaron]

Hi Brian,

A fellow photographer asked me last night about minimum requirements for a new PC.  My rough advice was minimum 32Gb of RAM, preferably 64, as much memory as possible in addition to external HD’s.  What other specs are important with the current versions of Bridge and PS?

[Brian]

The Graphics Card / Video Card. Believe it or not, that is more important than the CPU speed with the current versions of Photoshop. You want to have a NVIDIA Card with 8GB or 16GB of dedicated Video Memory.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 with 8GB of Video Memory is one of the cards that Photoshop loves to work with. Good luck finding one. Even more luck finding one that is less than $1500. COVID19 / Chip Shortage had really drove up prices.

The reason that Photoshop needs to have a beefy video card is due to the fancy tools that are in today's Photoshop. Things like Content Aware, Liquefy, Lens Corrections, things like that...all of them primarily use the GPU and Video Memory. Which is why you want at least 8GB going forward. Also, things like Topaz Software also can be told to use the Video GPU and there is a noticeable difference in terms of performance with those software packages.

For today's PC:

i7 or i9 CPU

32GB RAM (Minimum) 64GB (Preferred) - This is especially true if you have or are thinking about getting a High Mega-Pixel Camera, such as a Nikon D850. 100MB Raw files can be a bit of a hassle with 32GB or less RAM.

1TB Main HD / Boot HD. If it's m.2 or SSD, doesn't matter, you want at least 1TB. Of course, you could get a 2TB model, but that drives up the cost.

Power Supply to support not only the components / motherboard, but the video card. If you do get a NVIDIA 3070 or something faster, you will need a P/S to power it. 850 Watts is a good  number to shoot for, though you may get away with a little less, like 700 Watts.

[Aaron]

Legend, thank you