Recommend Me a Desktop for Photoshop (+ Monitor?)

chickentaste on 30/10/2017 - 00:09
Last edited 30/10/2017 - 10:25

It's Mrs Chickentaste's birthday next month, she wants to replace the ageing desktop box she uses for photoshop with something from this decade.

Looking for suggestions for something relatively cheap and easy, doesn't have to be too swish, just needs enough grunt to handle photoshop and be futureproof enough that I can stick some more RAM and a new CPU in it in a few years when it starts to slow down.

I used to build my own machines all the time but don't have time for it since we had kids so I'm open to this as an option, but I figured something refurbished from ebay or similar would be easier.

Also potentially looking for a monitor to go with this if anyone can point me at something. I know designers pay thousands for top-quality monitor but that's not really what I'm aiming for here, I love her but not that much :-)

I was hoping to budget around 500 bucks for the desktop, lets see how far I can get with that before we go any higher.

Cheers.

Computing

Comments

  • spackbace on 30/10/2017 - 00:59
    +2

    Be helpful to let people know the budget ;)

    Also with photoshop is she editing raw or jpeg?

    • cypher67 on 30/10/2017 - 09:47

      This - it all comes down to Budget.

      • chickentaste on 30/10/2017 - 10:26

        Fair point. About 500 bucks, see comments above though.

        Mostly Raw, in photoshop and lightroom.

        • spackbace on 30/10/2017 - 10:41

          $500? Yeesh that'll be tough.

          What pc does she use now? Spec?

        • scrimshaw on 30/10/2017 - 13:30

          If your budget includes a monitor, that's going to be super tough. For colour sensitive work you'll want a IPS monitor that's color accurate, and that starts at $230~300.

        • chickentaste on 30/10/2017 - 13:37

          @scrimshaw:

          I figured 500 excluding the monitor.

          Current PC is about 8 years old, not sure of spec as it was passed on but it wouldve been a low/medium spec gaming machine back then.

  • scrimshaw on 30/10/2017 - 01:25

    The Ryzen powered Dells on eBay seem to be fairly good value. It was posted with 209 positive votes.

    They are specced with Ryzen 5 1600x (a good 6 core CPU), 8G of RAM 2400mhz (which is borderline insufficient) and discrete RX570 GPU and it goes for $1200 (on a good 20 percent sale).

  • iforgotmysocks on 30/10/2017 - 07:05

    For the monitor, Dell U2414H or U2417H can be picked up for under $250 on sale or from the Dell outlet.

  • Presence on 30/10/2017 - 13:47

    Go on eBay and search for i5 3470, plenty of ex office PCs for cheap. Just make sure you get an SSD. Does Photoshop benefit from a GPU? Even within $500 total you could get a half height one new.

  • marcusv on 30/10/2017 - 14:07

    I would get a refurbished Dell, add an SSD and make a Hackintosh.

    I have been using Photoshop on both PC and MAC for years and I find the Mac OS much more stable for Adobe applications.

  • chickentaste on 01/11/2017 - 14:24

    Thanks everyone for the ideas.

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