Entry Plus Photography PC

A value system for the amateur photographer

This system offers a good upgrade over our entry photography system. This system uses the quad core AMD Ryzen 3 3100 processor which is the latest generation AMD processor.  In terms of raw compute performance, its around 18% ahead of the AMD 3400G system. It’s still a value focused system, but with the 16GB RAM and 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD and the 2TB HDD, it now leaves a regular desktop PC system for dust.

One of the key upgrades in this PC system is the inclusion of the NVidia GTX 1050Ti 4GB discrete graphics card.  Its faster than the Radeon Vega in the entry system and it is far better able to handle large volumes of data processing as it has its own dedicated 4GB of video ram on the card.  Memory bandwidth is no longer a bottleneck and users will have the benefit of being able to use all 16GB of system memory rather than being forced to allocate some for video memory.

The SSD drive is also a higher performance model as it uses the much higher performance M.2 NVMe technology and with 500GB of storage capacity, its over twice the size of the drive used in our Entry Photography PC.

The money has been carefully spent on the components which offer the biggest performance boost and bang for buck for the amateur photographer. Anyone undertaking more heavy duty image processing tasks would be better off looking at our higher end models.

This system is perfectly capable of running Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC applications but the image file sizes should be kept to a small size, ideally below 200MB when in memory. Users should avoid complex transformations and multiple layers.

Modern commercial image processing software requires a minimum of 16GB of memory, and you will need plenty of fast storage to hold your image catalogue. This is a budget system which has 16GB of memory.

The processor is an AMD Ryzen 3 3100 offering quad cores and a 3.6GHz frequency with 3.9GHz Turbo. The performance isn’t at all bad given the low price point as Photoshop benefits mainly from increases in processor frequency rather than multiple processor cores.  Don’t be put off by the Ryzen 3 branding on this processor, the performance is very similar to the Intel i7-7700 which was the fastest CPU for photo editing only 18 months ago.

Read our blog articles to find out more about customising your PC spec to benefit Photoshop and Lightroom.