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 Intel Core i3-9100F processor which is the latest 9th generation processor from Intel.  In terms of raw compute performance, its around 18% ahead of the AMD 2400G system and many professional photo and video editing software suites are better optimised for Intel than AMD. It’s still a value focused system, but with the 16GB RAM and 512GB 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 1050 2GB discrete graphics card.  Although only slightly faster than the Radeon Vega in the entry system, it is far better able to handle large volumes of data processing as it has its own dedicated 2GB 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 512GB 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 a Core i3-9100F offering quad cores and a 3.6GHz frequency with 4.2GHz 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 Core i3 branding on this processor, the performance is very similar to the 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.