Portable Photoshop build

[Jizba]

I'm looking to build or buy a small form factor computer to use as backup workstation for digital painting. My goal is to have something that can work on my massive photoshop files well enough to serve as a back up for my workstation, but be small enough to travel with on occasion.  Just for a rough idea about the workload I usually paint at either 3k x 6k or 6k x 12k pixels with a large number of complex layers, and the file size ranges from 250mb to 2gb.  I'll be using it once or twice a week at an art group, traveling with it 1-2 times a year, and it also serves as an off site physical back up for my main workstation.  Also my budget is at most $750 us but the less I spend the more money I can spend upgrading my tablet monitor.

 

Why am I building a small tower?  Well I usually have less than 24" to fit my laptop or pc and a tablet monitor on my art group table.  So laptops can take up a little too much space, and the tablets that fit my budget aren't quite powerful enough to work on my big photoshop files.  If i did find an inexpensive used laptop with specs close to what I want to build, but that cost less I would probably go for that instead tbh.

 

So here's what I'm thinking.

max 15"x15"x6" case - (I'm trying to find some good options but I just started looking.)

Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard - (anything small, functional and cheap.)

i5 - 9600  - ( I'm looking to maximize 1-4 core performance for under $250 which probably means intel.)

Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 - (or best performance for the cost)

GTX 1050 (I dont need much out of the gpu but I dont want to take ram away from photoshop to run video)

SSD boot drive 120-250 gb, preferably M.2 (Its only for windows, photoshop and illustrator but more space would be nice)

2tb hard drive

120gb sata ssd, for photoshop to use as a scratch disk, because they only cost like $20 now.

400w PSU - I'm not sure I need more since I dont want a powerful graphics card.

 

If you guys have any better ideas, or if I'm doing anything horribly wrong please let me know.

[brob]

According to https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CPU-Roundup-AMD-Ryzen-3-AMD-Threadripper-2-Intel-9th-Gen-Intel-X-series-1529/ the Ryzen 5 3600 for the most part does better in Photoshop than the i5-9600K.

 

One needs to verify that the motherboard shipped has a 3600 compatible BIOS. For the most part this should not be a problem, but it is still worth checking.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor  ($194.79 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac Mini ITX AM4 Motherboard  ($119.89 @ OutletPC) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory  ($78.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Intel 660p Series 1.02 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  ($94.99 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 3 GB SC GAMING Video Card  ($159.99 @ B&H) 
Case: Silverstone SG05BB-450-USB3.0 (Black) Mini ITX Desktop Case  ($49.99 @ B&H) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS SGX 450 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply  ($97.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Total: $796.63
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-09-13 23:22 EDT-0400

[Streetguru]

1 hour ago, Jizba said:

 

ASrock Desk Mini A300 with a 2400G or 3400G, with fast memory and an NVME drive.

 

Integrated graphics aren't going to take up much system memory.

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16856158064?item=N82E16856158064&source=region&nm_mc=knc-googleadwords-pc&cm_mmc=knc-googleadwords-pc-_-pla-_-barebone+systems-_-N82E16856158064&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_OzrBRDmARIsAAIdQ_Le6zvZMJFFoVUGIEwQ-G3PdQ5JWNwygIu5gtkDyG3JuqVWxtCtpGsaArckEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

 

Maybe did some harder tests here, don't remember.

 

[Jizba]

2 hours ago, brob said:

According to https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CPU-Roundup-AMD-Ryzen-3-AMD-Threadripper-2-Intel-9th-Gen-Intel-X-series-1529/ the Ryzen 5 3600 for the most part does better in Photoshop than the i5-9600K.

 

One needs to verify that the motherboard shipped has a 3600 compatible BIOS. For the most part this should not be a problem, but it is still worth checking.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor  ($194.79 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac Mini ITX AM4 Motherboard  ($119.89 @ OutletPC) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory  ($78.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Intel 660p Series 1.02 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  ($94.99 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 3 GB SC GAMING Video Card  ($159.99 @ B&H) 
Case: Silverstone SG05BB-450-USB3.0 (Black) Mini ITX Desktop Case  ($49.99 @ B&H) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS SGX 450 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply  ($97.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Total: $796.63
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-09-13 23:22 EDT-0400

Yeah I was looking at the Ryzen 5 3600, but I might be a bit of an edge case.  The biggest bottleneck in my work flow is brush and tool lag.  Looking at those benchmarks the intels seem to be beating the ryzen in the tasks most similar to how the brushes work... or at least I think so.  From what I've read its mostly about brute forcing as burst clock speed and ram as possible on a single core.

 

That being said the Ryzen 5 is still probably a better deal since its $20-30 less and the performance is so close.

 

I'm also going to need a second drive for sure.  I'm not comfortable creating 10 gig scratch files for photoshop on my boot drive, its a lot of reads and writes for a solid state device.

 

[Jizba]

2 hours ago, Streetguru said:

ASrock Desk Mini A300 with a 2400G or 3400G, with fast memory and an NVME drive.

 

Integrated graphics aren't going to take up much system memory.

Yeah, I thought the same thing when I bought my current computer.  The stuff I'm working on is large enough that it does make a noticeable difference, I would need to build an APU system with 32 gigs of ram and I'm not sure how well that would perform against a 16 gig system with a discrete graphics card.

[Streetguru]

22 minutes ago, Jizba said:

 

2800mhz 32GBs kits cost as much as normal DDR4 actually.

Guess it just comes down to if the APU has enough performance, and you want that small of a box.

Might want to get 32GBs anyways if you're already pushing 16GBs near the limit.

https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-32gb-260-pin-ddr4-so-dimm/p/N82E16820232190

[Jizba]

1 hour ago, Streetguru said:

 

Yeah that would save me about $150 on my build, but at the same time its using the last gen ryzen architecture with a lower clock speed than the ryzen 5 2600.   I'm probably better off fixing up my old workstation with an i7 3770 in it if I go that route.   The i5 9600 and ryzen 5 3600 both show about a 20-30% improvement for photoshop over my old rig making the upgrade worth while.

[brob]

11 hours ago, Jizba said:

Yeah I was looking at the Ryzen 5 3600, but I might be a bit of an edge case.  The biggest bottleneck in my work flow is brush and tool lag.  Looking at those benchmarks the intels seem to be beating the ryzen in the tasks most similar to how the brushes work... or at least I think so.  From what I've read its mostly about brute forcing as burst clock speed and ram as possible on a single core.

 

That being said the Ryzen 5 is still probably a better deal since its $20-30 less and the performance is so close.

 

I'm also going to need a second drive for sure.  I'm not comfortable creating 10 gig scratch files for photoshop on my boot drive, its a lot of reads and writes for a solid state device.

 

 

You might check forums specific to the sort of work you are doing to see if anyone is using or has tried a 3600 cpu. If it's going to be laggy in a commonly used function I'm not sure it would be worth the savings.

 

The drive I suggested is rated at over 100GB writes every day for five years. More expensive TLC NVMe drives have even higher write endurance. I think people are overly sensitive about ssd write endurance because it is actually stated. HDD also have limited write endurance but the mechanical parts usually fail before those limits are reached.

 

If you are willing to opt for a good, but lower quality psu a 250GB ssd would be in budget.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor  ($194.79 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac Mini ITX AM4 Motherboard  ($119.89 @ OutletPC) 
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory  ($78.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: ADATA Ultimate SU800 256 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($37.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Intel 660p Series 1.02 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  ($94.99 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 3 GB SC GAMING Video Card  ($159.99 @ B&H) 
Case: Silverstone SG05BB-450-USB3.0 (Black) Mini ITX Desktop Case  ($49.99 @ B&H) 
Power Supply: Silverstone SFX 300 W 80+ Bronze Certified SFX Power Supply  ($59.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $796.62
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-09-14 14:06 EDT-0400