Topic: Which CPU and how much RAM for Photoshop in 2018? (Read 8591 times)

stevierose · « **on:** October 30, 2018, 08:07:21 pm »

I'm not sure if this should go in the computer section or Photoshop section, but as I am interested in input from folks who use Photoshop a lot I will put it here. Today they announced the new Mac Mini. This is good news for me because I have a high quality dedicated monitor so didn't want an iMac and can't justify a Mac Pro. My question is this--which CPU and how much RAM do I need to easily do photo editing with the latest software versions? I use Lightroom, Photoshop, and various plug-ins. I shoot RAW with APS and occasionally full frame sensors. I don't shoot MF digital. I also shoot film which I scan. I print to an Epson 800. The CPU choices include a 3.6 Ghz quad core 8th generation Intel i3, 3.2 GHz 6 core i7, 3.0 Ghz 6 core i5 with turbo boost, and a 3.2 Ghz i7 with turbo boost. I don't do any significant amount of video editing. I am willing to spend what I need to configure a good photo editing computer but don't want to waste money buying power I don't need. What do you folks think I should get?

Thanks
Steve Rosenblum

TommyWeir · « **Reply #1 on:** October 31, 2018, 06:39:57 am »

I’d avoid the i3, a budget processor, some say they’re i5s that didn’t pass certain benchmarks. This is the first time Apple have used them. The rest should cope fine. Obviously, you pay for what you get, move up the scale and things get faster. The GPU is the other factor to consider.

Garnick · « **Reply #2 on:** October 31, 2018, 07:32:51 am »

Hi Steve,

Here's another approach to try perhaps. LuLa is a great forum and one that I frequent daily, but when it comes to questions such as you have raised I would suggest two other forums as well. The Apple forum and the Adobe Photoshop forum. Both have some very knowledgeable people waiting to answer your questions and offer some very viable suggestions. I would try the Apple forum first, since your quest is to put together a hardware package that would do the best job for your purposes. Give them a try and report back if possible.

https://discussions.apple.com/welcome

https://forums.adobe.com/community/photoshop

Gary

davidgp · « **Reply #3 on:** October 31, 2018, 09:56:52 am »

Hi Steve,

The tests are done under Windows PCs, but Pudget system evaluates a lot of systems with Lightroom and Photoshop benchmarks and they evaluated the new processors that come in the Mac Mini (that are not new... basically those processors have been available in the market more than one year ago):

- https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2017-1-1-CPU-Performance-Core-i7-8700K-i5-8600K-i3-8350K-1057/

The new version of Photoshop, the 2018, they have only evaluated using the latests Intel or AMD processors: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2018-Core-i7-9700K-i9-9900K-Performance-1248/ , so not useful for you.

Maybe that tests can give you and idea of what you want.

Regards,

David

guido · « **Reply #4 on:** October 31, 2018, 10:23:44 am »

I've been using PS 2018/2019 on a Powerspec Win10 system with: i7-8700k, 32GB DDR4 3200 RAM and a GSX 1070 11 GB DDR5 display adapter and SSDs for system and scratch. I have been very happy with the performance handling 51 MP files with lots of layers, 3-5 raw image HDR merges, etc... Very snappy responsive system.

kers · « **Reply #5 on:** October 31, 2018, 12:39:11 pm »

I choose the 10 core i9 - ( it has more cores and more (44) PCI lines)
the extra PCI lanes are handy for NVME memory support that uses 3lanes- and the GPU already 16...
it runs At 4.5 GHZ with watercooling and does 1800% work with LR 7.5 - 35- 40 nef d850 /minute to 16 bit tiff.
Photoshop uses less cores - not optimized since 19..? 6 cores will do.
5600 one core and 40.000 10 core - benchmark geekbench 4.2
32 GIG ram is enough for almost all cases ( i work with images of 10 GB)

stevierose · « **Reply #6 on:** October 31, 2018, 09:19:53 pm »

Quote from: Garnick on October 31, 2018, 07:32:51 am

Hi Steve,

Here's another approach to try perhaps. LuLa is a great forum and one that I frequent daily, but when it comes to questions such as you have raised I would suggest two other forums as well. The Apple forum and the Adobe Photoshop forum. Both have some very knowledgeable people waiting to answer your questions and offer some very viable suggestions. I would try the Apple forum first, since your quest is to put together a hardware package that would do the best job for your purposes. Give them a try and report back if possible.

https://discussions.apple.com/welcome

https://forums.adobe.com/community/photoshop

Gary

Thanks Gary! I have posted to both of those forums. Steve

stevierose · « **Reply #7 on:** October 31, 2018, 09:21:17 pm »

Quote from: davidgp on October 31, 2018, 09:56:52 am

Hi Steve,

The tests are done under Windows PCs, but Pudget system evaluates a lot of systems with Lightroom and Photoshop benchmarks and they evaluated the new processors that come in the Mac Mini (that are not new... basically those processors have been available in the market more than one year ago):

- https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2017-1-1-CPU-Performance-Core-i7-8700K-i5-8600K-i3-8350K-1057/

The new version of Photoshop, the 2018, they have only evaluated using the latests Intel or AMD processors: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2018-Core-i7-9700K-i9-9900K-Performance-1248/ , so not useful for you.

Maybe that tests can give you and idea of what you want.

Regards,

David

Thanks David! I stumbled across the Puget website while doing a Google search on this subject and found it to be very helpful. Steve

Wayne Fox · « **Reply #8 on:** November 01, 2018, 12:41:25 am »

Quote from: stevierose on October 30, 2018, 08:07:21 pm

I don't do any significant amount of video editing. I am willing to spend what I need to configure a good photo editing computer but don't want to waste money buying power I don't need.

well, it’s all a matter of what’s acceptable. For most tasks photoshop does just fine on average hardware. but there are those things that pop up a progress bar and you can do nothing but wait. Obviously if there is one thing that you do a lot and it takes a considerable amount of time on a quad core i5, and if it runs 15-30% faster on a 6 core i7, then maybe it’s worth it? Hard to say but you really can’t get too much power, its usually about getting enough to make you happy and still fit your budget. I know I bought a MacBook Pro a few years ago, and immediately regretted it just because even if the model above it was only a little faster I felt it was worth it. Sold it and bought the top of the line. So if it were me I’d go ahead and spring for the 6 core i7. Only $200 more than the 6 core i5. The small clock speed gain is minimal, but hey, every cycle counts.

However if you are willing to wait a while, Digiloyd at macperformanceguide.com has a very good test he calls photoshop huge and it’s a pretty good way to benchmark PS performance on various Macs. Not sure if he’ll test the Mac mini but he might. Also I just read over there that the MacMini is upgradeable so it might pay to buy the minimum ram from apple and then upgrade to 32 or more with OWC memory. That’s usually a cheaper route.

Ethan Hansen · « **Reply #9 on:** November 01, 2018, 04:57:47 pm »

Photoshop is not particularly efficient at using many CPU cores. For example, I tried running Photoshop on our primary server we use for building profiles (4X 14-core Xeon, 256 GB memory, 2X Tesla graphics cards). Until file sizes got huge, Photoshop was if anything less responsive than on my XPS 13 laptop with a single Core i7.

More than 6 cores gives diminishing returns for your money. I would budget stuffing your system with memory and a decent-sized, fast NVMe SSD. Add a video card that is capable but not top-end (e.g. Nvidia 1070) if you plan on using GPU accelerated plug-ins such as those from Topaz.

All this assumes you are not working with 100+ MB, full-frame medium format captures. If so, you'll likely want something other than Photoshop for processing RAWs. Beefier systems are in order here.

kers · « **Reply #10 on:** November 01, 2018, 05:09:45 pm »

To speed up photoshop:

fast cpu- 6 core
enough RAM 16gb ram( enough for not too big images as stated)
and fast harddisk...
the latter could be a 970 samsung pci ( 2500mb/sec) or cheaper/larger a normal SSD ( 500mb/sec)-
GPU not that important.

stevierose · « **Reply #11 on:** November 02, 2018, 04:56:47 pm »

Thanks everyone!

Steve

faberryman · « **Reply #12 on:** November 02, 2018, 05:25:44 pm »

Quote from: kers on November 01, 2018, 05:09:45 pm

GPU not that important.

Only important to the extent you want it to support the monitor you want to get. You don't want to buy that 5K monitor only to learn your GPU won't support it.

WayneLarmon · « **Reply #13 on:** November 03, 2018, 09:00:08 am »

Quote from: faberryman on November 02, 2018, 05:25:44 pm

[GPU is] Only important to the extent you want it to support the monitor you want to get. You don't want to buy that 5K monitor only to learn your GPU won't support it.

I recently upgraded my desktop machine with a 1070 Ti to run A.I. Gigapixel. Works fine with my 2+ megapixel 1920x1200 24" monitor and my ~3.6 megapixel 2560x1440 27" monitor. Then I started hankering for a 32 megapixel 8K monitor (when they come down in price) only to find that I'd need a 1080 to run 8K. The 1080 was about $30 more than the 1070 Ti.

96 megapixel images (2X 24 megapixels) created by A.I. Gigapixel are difficult to evaluate on a 2 megapixel 24" monitor. It is difficult to determine if "plausible" detail is really plausible when it will be viewed on a >300 PPI medium (large print...) My 8 megapixel 4K 14" laptop is 320 PPI but is only about 12" x 7".

Megapixels need GPU.

Wayne

TonyVentourisPhotography · « **Reply #14 on:** November 27, 2018, 09:53:29 pm »

Depends on your photoshop preferences too. If you do big layer stacks with light painted images, composites, etc... and file sizes of psd files are in the gigabyte range...more power is nice.

I just upgraded to an i7 Mac mini. I went 64gb ram and a vega 64 video card...but that is probably overkill. A decent video card will be plenty...but I would go with at least 24gb of ram. I would never choose an i5 if I did a lot of work on it. I made that mistake with my laptop. The i7 just always feels snappier with larger files. Regardless everything feels nice and efficient again. Especially Lightroom.

Two23 · « **Reply #15 on:** November 27, 2018, 10:58:48 pm »

I have an Intel six core i7 for processor, 32gb DDR4, and a Radeon RX570 video card with 4gb memory. All of this is probably way overkill for photo software, but I got a great deal on it from my son, who bought a much bigger computer last summer. He's a video game programmer for MicroSoft. I think the most important thing is to get a graphics capable monitor of one sort or another.

Kent in SD

kers · « **Reply #16 on:** November 28, 2018, 04:56:25 am »

Intel just has launched a new processor line

my favourite is

Core i7-9800X Skylake-X 8/16 3,8 / 4,4 / 4,5GHz 16,5MB 44lanes ddr4-2400 140W $589

8 core - 44 lanes 4.5 GHZ
would be perfect for photoshop/LR

aaronchan · « **Reply #17 on:** November 29, 2018, 10:33:13 am »

According to my knowledge, Ps and Lr uses most of the CPU rather than the GPU (CUDA). Something like the new AMD with 24 threads would be a great tool to run something hardcore.
But, even tho AMD has a lower price when it comes to C/P (cost over performance), I still personally prefer intel. I am actually planning to build an intel i9 machine after the Chinese New Year and hope that machine could serves me well in the next 5-8 years.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Christopher · « **Reply #18 on:** November 29, 2018, 06:05:35 pm »

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2019-Intel-X-series-2018-Refresh-Performance-1280/

If you want to test it yourself:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Puget-Systems-Adobe-Photoshop-CC-Benchmark-1132/

I have no connection to Puget Systems, nor do I want to promote their products, however, the benchmark is a great tool and their test of various systems is a great guideline.

I currently run two systems:
i9-9900k with 64GB - NV RTX 2070
i9-7920X with 128GB - NV RTX 2070

For Photoshop the "cheaper" 9900k is faster as long as memory doesn't run out. For C1, PtGui and Lightroom the 7920X is faster. However, for C1 and a lot of Photoshop filters and plugins, the GPU is more and more important. While I like what AMD is doing, they don't get close when it comes to PS performance.

kers · « **Reply #19 on:** November 29, 2018, 07:40:18 pm »

Quote from: Christopher on November 29, 2018, 06:05:35 pm

...
I currently run two systems:
i9-9900k with 64GB - NV RTX 2070
i9-7920X with 128GB - NV RTX 2070

For Photoshop the "cheaper" 9900k is faster as long as memory doesn't run out. For C1, PtGui and Lightroom the 7920X is faster. However, for C1 and a lot of Photoshop filters and plugins, the GPU is more and more important. While I like what AMD is doing, they don't get close when it comes to PS performance.

The i9-9900k while very fast has only 16 PCI lanes- that means no lanes are available after you have connected your GPU.
And you need more lanes for PCI; fast memory, like the samsung 970 evo is connected through a 4 lane pci-interface.
This type of memory - it does 2500mb/sec- is a vital part of the speed of your system as a whole.

Author Topic: Which CPU and how much RAM for Photoshop in 2018? (Read 8591 times)