Building a Photoshop Power PC – Part 1
Every computer I’ve ever owned has had one thing in common and I’m not talking about the fact that they’ve all run a version of Windows. Whenever it’s been time to replace a PC I’ve always ended up buying one straight off the shelf and usually from a high street retailer.
Well now it’s time to upgrade again but this time I’ve decided to do things differently by building my own PC. Why? Well first it should save me a few pennies and second I can choose exactly the parts I want (within my budget) to tailor make a real Photoshop power PC.
As this is my first PC build I’ve spent the past few weeks researching what makes Photoshop run faster and which components I can afford on my £800 budget.
CPU & Motherboard
The CPU processor which is the brains of the computer. After a bit of research I ruled out the cheaper AMD processors as the latest Intel processors are far faster. The Intel i7 is the current top processor on the market, but it’s outside my budget, so I opted for the Intel i5 2500K. I ordered mine for Scan Computers who are also assembling the CPU, cooler and motherboard.
Overclocking
To make up for the lack of an i7 I’m having my i5 “overclocked” Basically this means the clever chaps at Scan are increasing the speed of the stock processor by around 20%.
RAM
Photoshop loves RAM so you’ll need lots and lots of RAM. My first PC had a tiny 16mb or ram, but for the new PC I’ve ordered 16GB which is roughly 1000 time more RAM then 15 years ago. I was chatting about RAM to an Adobe engineer a few months back and apparently if you increase your RAM from 4gb to 8gb and you’ll only see a small improvement in Photoshop speed. However going from 4GB to 16GB should double the speed of Photoshop.
Solid State Drive
SSD’s are the new “must have” add on for any power PC. An SSD is like a large memory card which runs at super fast speeds. So in theory with the SSD drive set as Photoshop’s scratch disk, things should run smoother and faster.
Hard Drive
I’ve opted for a 2TB hard drive for my main storage. It’s one of the newer SATA III drives which has a fairly fast data speed I’ll also be installing the hard drives from my old PC.
Graphics Card
If there’s one place you can scrimp a little, it’s on the graphics card. I’m not planning to do any “gaming” on the new PC and as Photoshop doesn’t really need anything special in the graphics department, I’m reusing my existing 1gb Radeon HD 4650 graphics card from my current PC. It’s about a year old and still has plenty of life in it.
(UPDATE: If you’re planning on using Photoshop EXTENDED and using it’s 3D tools then a decent graphics card should be on your shopping list)
Case
OK, so the case isn’t going to make Photoshop run faster, but I’ll be looking at it every day, so it’s important.
For my case I’ve opted for the Fractal R3. It’s a low noise case which should reduce the background hum I sometimes get in my videos.
Here’s a list of all the parts I’ve ordered.
CASE: Fractal Designs R3
PSU: Corsair builder 500w
DVD drive: Pioneer DVDRW
Card Reader: Akasa AK-ICR
CPU: Intel i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5Ghz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GAZ68AP-D3
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13
Ram: 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600Mhz
Hard Drive: 2TB Western Digital
SSD: Corsair Force 3 120GB
Operating System: Windows 7 64bit Home Premium
TOTAL COST £830 inc VAT & Delivery
My office is now starting to fill up with components, but with a few key parts still to arrive the new build will have to wait. I’ll keep you informed about my progress
I’d disagree with the idea that Photoshop can run on a poor graphics card – it SPECIFICALLY needs a decent graphics card, as the entire 3D rendering engine runs off it – you basically can’t run 3D without a good one, at least a PCIx one. OK, if you’re a photographer you might not want to do 3D, but a lot of the people who read your blog might spend some of their budget on other stuff and then find out too late that they’ve spent the lot and can’t run 3D..
Chris if you read carefully above in original post, its mentioned that if you need to work with the 3D stuff you will need a better graphics card.
@gavin: Good one, I was planning to have a new Desktop by dumping my in use lappy, so asked a friend, who is in networks and deals with similar stuff, he suggested exactly same kind of stuff to me. In fact similar processor and stuff. I am looking forward to that, and I would say you have made good choices.
Sounds awesome Gav. You’re a lucky boy 🙂
Hi Gavin
I did just what you are doing after 6 month i then went I got myself a Mac, yes I know its well over your budget, my first mac i might add, its taken time for me to get my head around the apple machine. I have to say the best money I have every spent on a computer. I still have the overclocked i7 but not using it for any photography work
not a bad build,but disagree about graphics cards,photoshop uses opengl which is used on your graphics card,i would opt for a middle of the road graphics card,i currently use the ati hd4850 but the newer cards would do your system justice,also i would suggest ditching windows 7 in favour of osx lion and windows in bootcamp.
It’s a similar set up to mine which i use for gaming and photoshop so my GPU is top end. I also had 4Gb memory in and upgraded to 8Gb and noticed a difference in photoshop cs5.
As for running the OS I had found windows 7 64bit to be more than reliable and more wildly available to the public which helps Gav, in your photoshop articles.
i would have pushed for an i7 personally as it will last you in the long term, but i5 pretty decent too.
I would be more interested in finding out whether the SSD gives you the smoother & faster performance you’re looking for.
Will you be giving some feedback in the months to come ?
Gav, when you say the SSD is set as photoshop scratch – you’re using it as your main OS drive with Win 7 etc installed on it?
That’s right Steve, the SSD will be the main C: dive
Your mainboard has RAID 0 support – it’s nice to know that you can increase bandwidth read/write by adding more SSD’s and also increase storage capacity at the same time. Can’t do that on an iMac… 😉
Gavin if you are using the SSD as a PS scratch disk, don’t forget to put Adobe Bridge’s cache directory to the SSD as well!
I did that many years ago. It was fun doing it but I eventually switched to the MAC platform and recycled the PC. Enjoy
I built my first computer about a month ago with Photoshop in mind. The hardest part of the whole process to me was picking out the components. There are so many choices that that part of the process was really difficult.. plus having to stay within a budget made it harder. Good luck with yours. Sounds like you are cheating a bit and having someone else actually assemble yours. I’m 65 years old and I did my own assembly. Quite proud of myself actually!
nice rig and way cheaper than a mac. you rock!!!
Hi Gavin, been watching through your youtube vids for about a week now! I’ve learnt so much.
Came to your website and saw this, wanted to – in a very small way – give you some advice in return
SSD’s amazing as they are, are not ‘so’ great at writes, they excel at read speeds. Putting your OS and the PS scratch disk on there isn’t the best way IMHO. My OS disk is an SSD but for best performance you need to move the pagefile to a different fast drive, and the PS scratch disk to another – or move it to a few drives. Not sure if you have any money left from your budget for a fast HDD
If not then, maybe something you could look at in the future if the performance isn’t what you expected
..going back to watch more videos
Thanks for teaching me so much in the last week. One question though, you don’t appear to have aged over the last 4 years….what’s your secret (the missus wants to know!)?
Jase
Excellent rig Gav! Eerily similar to mine I built a few months ago. I opted not to overclock due to potential instability issues. Hope yours runs stable and cool at 4.5 GHz. Will make operations like content aware on large files a breeze!
I build custom PCs for a living as well as do a bit of photography on the side. I don’t believe that you needed to over-clock that beast, you’ll be happy enough with the multitasking capabilities and prolonged life and stability of the processor without the over-clock. This is a nice spec though! Have fun with it!
Noel
Your really taking the risk of overclocking the CPU.
On the SSD make sure you set it up correctly with TRIM and don’t do the DEFRAG or any of that type of maintenance…..
Thanks for the hint on Photoshop and the memory expansion. I am lucky enough to own twi i7 pc’s, one a new HP laptop and the other my desktop which is now 14 months old. I’m running CS5 on both but have only 6gb of ram. I’ll check out the price on the ram and do an upgrade.
Looks a lot like the system I built this spring, but I only put 12GB on the board.
I’m doing well with the Gigabyte board. I chose a graphics card with TRUE Windows 7 64bit drivers. Slightly older cards gave me headaches. 🙁
Gavin, taking your lead I just ordered many similar items to build a new Turbo Nutter Photoshop machine; I got 2x 64Gb SSD’s for the OS and a PS Scratch Disk, but cost of spinning disk has rocketed recently so compromised to a 500Gb HDD. Already have a 1Tb Network drive so wont be too much of an issue.
Thanks for your blog post. The things i would like to contribute is that personal computer memory must be purchased but if your computer can’t cope with that which you do with it. One can deploy two RAM boards with 1GB each, as an illustration, but not certainly one of 1GB and one with 2GB. One should always check the car maker’s documentation for one’s PC to ensure what type of storage is necessary.
great article, Gavin
I to have written an article on building a PC for Adobe Lightroom.
I did use the Intel I7 Sandy Bridge processor which I am very happy with. I only used 8GB but after reading your article. I think I’ll add another 8GB for a total of 16GB. I also like the idea of adding an SSD. I read you can use the SSD as a caching drive that automatically loads your most used programs, and greatly improves the speed of your applications like Photoshop or like.
Again, thanks for the great tips
Hi Gavin,
My internal hard drive recently failed 🙁 so I decided to follow your advice and install an SSD for boot up and programmes and the results are really great!
I am now looking to buy an 3TB internal hard drive for storage. I will be using this hard drive to access and save all of my Photoshop work. Can I please ask what model of WD drive you are using or what you would recommend for this purpose if you were to upgrade today (I appreciate this post is a couple of years old now)?
Thanks, Scott
I have a bunch of HDD’s all different makes and all work just fine. In my experience mechanical drives all work great… right up to the moment they don’t!