Hi Guys,
Have a friend that needs a new computer for professional photo editing.
They have suggested an 'all in one' from HN but I am reluctant to agree given those can not be upgraded.
Is it correct that an i7 processor is as good as it gets?
Also, with a 4K monitor is there any considerations to make, or should a decent brand be fine.
Any help would be great. Thanks.
Yes an i7 is generally a good thing to aim for, though they are not all created equal (eg. Laptop/Desktop).
Try and avoid and all in one as the monitor may not be any good and it might have a laptop CPU in it.
As above, you want a good CPU with good single core, but at least 4-6 cores.
Any AMD or Nvidia GPU will be fine, not intel ob board graphics though.
At last 16GB ram and a good SSD as large as you need, though somewhere else to store photos.
Monitor is likely the most important thing, it gets really complicated and everyone wants to claim theirs is good for graphics work, they arent.
"IPS" is a must to start with. Look at something like the Dell Ultrasharp UP2616D, comes calibrated and can do adobeRGB.
This is the US site, but you can an idea: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-27-monitor-w…
This tower from Dell is a great deal, more graphics power than you need but no one ever said no to more power…
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/352203#comment-5462675
That along with a monitor like the Dell i suggested above and you will be flying!
What's the budget? We can build a 15k system quite easily for photo editing along with some eizo monitors lol.
There are better CPU's than a Core i7 — if you're looking purely at Intel's stack there's a bunch of older generation Core i9's with 18 cores / 36 threads, but when you consider that not all Photoshop functions barely utilize even quad cores, you will find that the Core i7 is all you need.
These benchmarks performed by Puget systems for e.g shows that core count didn't make an impact on PS / CC performance, instead it simply favours per-core performance and extremely high clock speeds.
The i7-8700k takes the lead as a result because its turbo speeds are at 4.7ghz. the Core i9 despite having so many cores, actually lags behind.
Not sure about monitors for photo editing but might be worth checking out online buying guides such as this or this. Just be careful you're not reading guides with Amazon referral link spam.