Few Questions for a Photoshop PC for my client.

[Sangeet Khatri]

Hey Toms! Long time since I have been here!

I have to build a PC for my client for Photoshop CS4 use. I basically build gaming PCs and not PS related PCs, hence here are a few questions that I need to ask. He is on a really tight budget of INR 30,000 (~$470).

1. How much RAM is enough. For gaming PCs, 8GB is the sweet spot, but I don't know about Photoshop. Should I go with 16GB instead?

2. How many cores is Photoshop able to use. Will the difference be significant if I use 8 core AMD 8320 instead of the i5 4440 (cheapest i5 4th gen).

3. Will using a regular HDD hurt? Would that be a bottleneck when compared to SSD?

4. How much of an effect does GPU have on the photoshop. Does it utilize OpenCL. In that case will the i5 4440's inbuilt GPU be decent enough considering that we are in tight budget.

Thank you. These are the questions that I had. Suggestions are appreciated.

 

[kanewolf]

RAM depends on the size of image... HDD vs SSD same thing... Photoshop will use CUDA for some effects. That means an NVIDIA card. $500 I don't know if it can be done.

CS4 is a pretty old version of Photoshop. It probably is only a 32bit application so 8 GB will be more than enough. CS4 may not even support CUDA either.

Here are some notes on running it in Win 8...

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

Just as an added thing, Photoshop can utilize openCL but CUDA is a lot better in terms of acceleration.

 

[Sangeet Khatri]

RAM depends on the size of image. HDD vs SSD same thing.

Here are some notes on running it in Win 8...

Okay, so this is what my client has told me.

"I shoot in what is called as RAW format and each image is about 25MB. My system cannot process more than 100 RAW files in one attempt."

 

[kanewolf]

If your client is shooting RAW, he (or she) should investigate using LightRoom rather than Photoshop. LightRoom is geared to RAW processing.