Question Photographer PC Build

[ajcke]

I have a request from a photographer who lives in Lightroom and Photoshop all day. I've been looking at the following CPU, GPU, and mobos. Anything else I should consider? Would you recommend one of these builds over the others? Which build will give the user the least amount of lag in Lightroom?

Intel i7-13700K 16 core
Gigabyte RTX 4070 12 GB
Gigabyte Z790

AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12 core
Asus RTX 4070 12 GB
Asus PRIME X670

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 8 core
PowerColor RX 7900 24 GB
Asus TUF B650-PLUS

Intel i7-12700K 12 core
Aus TUF RTXZ 4070 Ti 12 GB
Gigabyte B760

 

[Lafong]

Anything else I should consider?

The drives?

 

[Misgar]

Visit the Puget Systems web site and check out their builds for Photoshop and Lightroom. These photo apps are not as GPU intensive as Premiere Pro (video), but will benefit from having a second Gen.4 M.2 NVMe drive as an exclusive scratch disk.

I use a third 1TB M.2 drive for Adobe "work in progress" (mostly Photoshop and Premiere Pro) then dump finished projects back to 5 internal hard disks.

If possible, fit a sufficiently large M.2 drive (4TB) to hold all the Lightroom lrcat (catalogue) folders, which can soon add up to hundreds of Gigabytes per catalogue and tens of thousands of small files. This is where speed is essential in Lightroom.

You should also visit the Adobe web site or find a tutorial about setting Preferences in Photoshop and Lightroom to optimise speed. Spread the load around multiple drives.

You don't mention RAM, but 32GB should be enough, unless your friend handles extremely large RAW images, in which case 64GB might be better. Again, check the Puget web site for the results from their Adobe benchmark program for different CPUs and the effect of different RAM sizes and speeds.

TLDR

Don't worry too much about a really fast GPU with 24GB RAM. An 8GB or 12GB GPU should be fine, especially for non video work.

Check Puget Systems web site for CPU and RAM recommendations.

Fit three M.2 NVMe drives. First for Windows + Adobe programs. Second as Adobe scratch disk. Third as Lightroom catalogue store.