Picking the right GPU for budget photo editing.

[Commodore Sim]

Hey guys. 

 

A family member has asked me to design a PC build for his photo editing and organization. I'm really trying to keep the price down and right now I only need to give him an estimate to budget for.  I've got a pretty good idea on most of the components but I'm not sure what graphics card to put into such a machine.

 

I'm wondering if GTX 1050ti or 1060 or their AMD equivalents are enough? And is there any advantage to going team green in this application?

 

Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5. 4 cores 8 threads 

2x 8g RAM 

ATX board with 4 channels for RAM.

[Electronics Wizardy]

meh 750 or igpu. You don't need much, and photohsop/lightroom doesn'' really use it anyways. 

 

Id get 32gb of ram if you can , you will use it.

[typographie]

For your purposes, GPU acceleration in Photoshop amounts to smooth scrolling and a bit of antialiasing when using certain tools. It doesn't take much to reach that point. The GT 640 in my 2012 iMac at work does just fine. A GTX 1050 Ti or RX 460 is likely more than enough, as long as Photoshop recognizes them. Your CPU, memory, and possibly SSD are likely to impact performance much more.

[Mauv]

Seriously, keep in mind a good quality SSD and RAM, loads and loads of RAM. 

I run photoshop with some management stuff up (GPUz and stuff) and it really won't use much my Graphics Card, only when I try to do some 3D editting on Photoshop. 

But when I got a SSD and more RAM, it was two worlds. I open photoshop and lightroom in 2 or 3 seconds tops.

[dizmo]

Depending on how much photo editing he does, RAM is what you want. Photoshop will eat as much RAM as you can throw at it. It might also be worth getting a small capacity, very high quality SSD to use as a scratch disk. Then a cheaper SSD for system files. Don't worry about the graphics card, you don't need anything special. A regular 1050 would be more than enough.

 

If you're looking to save money, get an i7 6700 and a cheap motherboard. You'll save a fair bit of money over the Xeon, and it's a slightly better performing chip.

 

Welcome to the forum! Don't forget to quote people if you reply to them.

[Zodiark1593]

The new IGPUs are more than suitable for photoshop, with the potential exception of a very fancy monitor that needs a Quadro to make full use of. 

 

Primarily, SSD, cpu, and a truckload of RAM in no particular order. 

[Commodore Sim]

20 hours ago, Mauv said:

Seriously, keep in mind a good quality SSD and RAM, loads and loads of RAM. 

I run photoshop with some management stuff up (GPUz and stuff) and it really won't use much my Graphics Card, only when I try to do some 3D editting on Photoshop. 

But when I got a SSD and more RAM, it was two worlds. I open photoshop and lightroom in 2 or 3 seconds tops.

Oh SSD for sure, just didn't feel the need to include it in description. 

[Commodore Sim]

20 hours ago, dizmo said:

Depending on how much photo editing he does, RAM is what you want. Photoshop will eat as much RAM as you can throw at it. It might also be worth getting a small capacity, very high quality SSD to use as a scratch disk. Then a cheaper SSD for system files. Don't worry about the graphics card, you don't need anything special. A regular 1050 would be more than enough.

 

If you're looking to save money, get an i7 6700 and a cheap motherboard. You'll save a fair bit of money over the Xeon, and it's a slightly better performing chip.

 

Welcome to the forum! Don't forget to quote people if you reply to them.

Actually you are incorrect.  The Xeon I've listed is $50 cheaper then the 6700.  Though I'll agree about the performance.

[Commodore Sim]

19 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

The new IGPUs are more than suitable for photoshop, with the potential exception of a very fancy monitor that needs a Quadro to make full use of. 

 

Primarily, SSD, cpu, and a truckload of RAM in no particular order. 

I'm probably going to stick with discrete card. The Xeon I'm looking at doesn't have IGPU though for $50 more I could buy an i7 that does. Though one issue IGPU is I need to depend on Mobo for I/O and they might bring price up too.

 

Everyone seems to be pushing RAM so I'll definatly be looking to tweak the build to maximise RAM.

[Zodiark1593]

2 hours ago, Commodore Sim said:

I'm probably going to stick with discrete card. The Xeon I'm looking at doesn't have IGPU though for $50 more I could buy an i7 that does. Though one issue IGPU is I need to depend on Mobo for I/O and they might bring price up too.

 

Everyone seems to be pushing RAM so I'll definatly be looking to tweak the build to maximise RAM.

Motherboard prices shouldn't be very expensive with the display output IO. Considering you need some sort of display, going for the i7 would be a good bet. 

[dizmo]

4 hours ago, Commodore Sim said:

Actually you are incorrect.  The Xeon I've listed is $50 cheaper then the 6700.  Though I'll agree about the performance.

Cheaper CPU yes, but the motherboards start at $140. H/B series motherboards start at $37.