PC Processors

[tas9195]

I am in the process of gathering parts for my 3rd build. I am by no means a PC builder. Just use common sense and a bunch of research. I do enjoy it though. I have used intel processors on the previous builds. I have gotten into photography since my last build and now realize with lightroom and photoshop and 5 years behind on technology that I need to upgrade. I am going looking into the Ryzen 5 based on research and reviews as a happy medium between budget and performance. Since the last build I have realized that some CPUs have onboard graphics. So I know what I am looking at. 1st question is if I went with say the 3400G would I need to get a GPU still or will the CPU suffice. If not should I stay with that and add a GPU. 2nd question what GPU would be a good fit with this.

[black_zion]

The current 3000 series APUs use previous generation CPU technology so you would be sacrificing on the order of 20% IPC, as well as more CPU cores. If I were you I would go with either the Ryzen 5 3600 or 3600X. GPU wise it becomes difficult. There's the RX 580 with 8GB VRAM which costs $190, but is several years old. There's the RX 5500XT which costs $190, but only has 4GB VRAM, but is less than a year old. But in two months AMD and nVidia will both detail the next series of cards which should be both higher performing and lower in price than current cards. I would recommend asking on the Adobe forums for their recommendations since more people using those programs will be there than here, and can tell you which aspect of the GPU would bring more performance.

Another thing to consider is Renoir, the Ryzen 4000 series APUs coming to the desktop very soon in the OEM market which have both the CPU performance of the 8 core Ryzen 3000 series, and the GPU performance of the 5500XT, with prices of $650-$800, though Bergman did say they would come to retail channels as well.

One thing's for sure though: Don't do anything until the end of the year if you can help it, there's too much about to change.

[elstaci]

For Video editing or commercial video software like Adobe Photoshop you will need to have a separate GPU card. I would look at Adobe website to see which GPU's they recommend for the software you are running.

Integrated Graphics may be powerful enough to run those types of software but not very well or not with all the features or as fast as a GPU card.

So I would get a powerful AMD processor without Integrated Graphics and a powerful PCIe GPU Card.

Depending what is recommended by your commercial software.

This tech review website gives which hardware (CPU,GPU,RAM,etc) that will run Photoshop the best and probably the same for Lightroom: https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Photoshop-139/Hardware-Recomm... 

[pokester]

I agree with the sentiments already expressed. I would not wait if you really need a new machine now, but if you can get by the next gen in graphics and cpus is right around the bend as already stated.

What I do want to add and to address exactly what you said you are going to do from another Photoshop user.

If you will be video editing a lot which you did not mention a high end GPU will benefit vs entry level.

With picture work in Photoshop any midrange card would be just fine. The big difference as Black Zion mentioned is memory on the GPU. 8gb vs 4gb is going to let you work with a bigger picture in real time. However a mid level card will in reality speed wise be absolutely negligible in operation speed wise. Yes one is faster but we are talking a couple seconds. Those benchmarks us about the most stressful things you can do in PS too and don't reflect true average workload.

So bottom line, buy as much GPU as you are comfortable spending and look for one with 8gb or more memory and I think you will be happy. 

Another thing to consider is that the more powerful the GPU the bigger power supply you need and the more heat the GPU generates. So that may not be worth the trade-off either. 

[pokester]

I want to add that you did not mention how much system ram you have. I really enjoy having gone from 16gb to 32gb of ram on my last couple builds with the Adobe apps. I really think it makes a difference. So that is another consideration, if you only have a certain budget available IMHO a mid level GPU with 8GB plus 32gb system ram with still be cheaper and do more for you than stepping up to another level of GPU only. 

[pokester]

Oh one more thing to know. If you end up going with a Green Team GPU vs AMD, you need to load their studio driver vs the game ready driver to get 10 bit support for Photoshop. If you are buying regular not workstation GPU's. 

[black_zion]

Which is true, Adobe is a four letter word and blocks Radeon cards from 10bpc support, but does this still hold true with AMD's Enterprise driver which they started releasing for Radeon cards?

[pokester]

I am not sure but I can tell you that on my RX 580 I had 10 bit support. When I went to my RTX card I lost it and it actually took me a long time to find out that I had to just load the studio driver.