Best value PC for the amateur photographer
When choosing components for a photography PC, there’s always a trade off between price and performance. When designing our best value photography PC we wanted to choose all the components that sit in that sweet spot of ultimate price / performance. At this price level, small amounts of extra cash spent on component upgrades can yield considerable performance gains.
Years of research and customer feedback are used to determine the sweet spot in terms of value and performance and here we’ve put all our knowledge and experience to put all these components together to produce the Punch Best Value Photography PC.
This system is capable of running Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC applications with reasonable image file sizes, ideally below 250MB when in memory. Users should avoid high complexity transformations and multiple layers of a large size unless upgrading this system to 32GB of system memory.
Firstly we’ve included a larger chassis able to handle a wider range of high performance processors and graphics cards and a higher performance power supply. The chassis is neat and is of a professional design yet has excellent airflow to keep high performance components cool. The video card is also an upgraded model being the GTX1050Ti 4GB. There is a significant performance boost to moving to the 4GB video memory when undertaking complex tasks with GPU acceleration with large image file sizes.
The main benefits of this system over our Entry Plus system are the inclusion of the excellent Gigabyte B360M-D3P motherboard which offers fantastic connectivity and is ideal for high data throughput requirements. The SSD drive is a high performance 512GB Intel 660p NVMe M.2 model with read and write speeds up to 3 times faster than the regular SSD used in the Entry Plus system. Add to that the inclusion of the high performance Intel 1733Mbps wireless and Bluetooth 5 and the NVidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB video card with twice the memory capacity of the card used in the entry plus, storage increase for the HDD to 3TB and you can see why we call this our Best Value Photography PC!
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 capable Core i3-8100 offering quad cores and a 3.6GHz base frequency. The performance is good as Photoshop benefits mainly from increases in processor frequency rather than multiple processor cores.
Read our blog articles to find out more about customising your PC spec to benefit Photoshop and Lightroom.
Quad Core 8th Gen Processor
3TB Storage Drive
High performance SSD
Specifications:
Processor
- Intel Core i3-8100 3.6Ghz Quad Core CPU,
- Cache: 6MB
- Delta Copper Core Air Cooler Installed
Memory
- 16GB DDR4 2400Mhz RAM
- Dual Channel – 2 x 8GB
- Supports up to 64GB
- 4 x DIMM sockets (2 Used)
Hard Drive
- 512GB Intel 660p NVMe M.2 SSD
- 1 x M.2 sockets, non free (1 used for the SSD Drive)
- 3TB Seagate BarraCuda 3.5″ Hard drive
- 6 SATA Ports, 4 free (2 Used for DVDRW & 3TB HDD)
Optical Drive
- Asus DVD Re-Writer, SATA, 24x, M-Disk Support
- 2 x Optical Bays, 1 free
Software
- Windows 10 Home
- Clean install, no additional software
Chipset
- Intel B360 Chipset
Display Outputs
- 1 x DisplayPort 1.4
- 1 x HDMI 2.0b
- 1 x DL-DVI
- Supports up to 3 monitors at once
- Supports HDCP
Graphics
- NVidia GTX 1050Ti 4GB
Audio
- High Definition Audio, 5.1 or 7.1 channel
- Audio provided by Realtek ALC892 Audio Chip on the motherboard
Input Devices
- No Keyboard or Mouse Included
Wired Networking
- Realtek 10/100/1000 LAN
Wireless Networking
- Intel CNVi Wireless-AC 9560 via Gigabyte GC-CI22M
- Speeds up to 1733mbps
- Bluetooth 5.0
Power Supply
- 400 watts
Dimensions
- Height: 429mm
- Width: 185mm
- Depth: 475mm
Interfaces
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard or Mouse Port
- 3 x USB 2.0 Port (1 front, 2 rear)
- 3 x USB 3.1 Port (1 front, 2 rear)
- 1 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A port (1 Rear, red)
- 1 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port (1 Rear)
- 1 x RJ-45 Ethernet Port
- 6 x Audio Jacks at the rear
- 2 x Audio Jacks at the front
- 1 x DisplayPort 1.4 on video card
- 1 x HDMI 2.0b on video card
- 1 x DL-DVI on video card
Note the display outputs from the motherboard are disabled when a graphics card is installed
Expansion
- 2 x PCI-e x 16 Slots, 1 free (1 x Used for video card)
- 2 x PCI-e x 1 Slots, 1 free (1 obscured by video card)
Case
- Fractal Design Focus I Black ATX Case
- Pre-installed Fractal Design Swift Series R1 Black 120 mm fan
- Space for 2 additional fans at the front
- Space to accept 120mm or 240mm liquid coolers
- 2 x Drive bays for either 2.5″ or 3.5″ drives, 1 free (1 used for 3TB drive)
- 2 x 5.25″ bays, 1 free (1 used for the DVDRW drive)
- 1 x 2.5″ bays, 1 free
Warranty
- 3 Year Return to Base parts and labour
- 1st 30 days collect and return at our expense
