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 entry models in our range use a much smaller chassis which is not as easily upgrade-able but this larger chassis used in this Best Value system offer huge upgrade potential. The video card is also an upgraded model being the latest generation GTX1650 4GB. There is a performance boost to moving to the GTX 1650 video card when undertaking complex tasks with GPU acceleration with large image file sizes.
We include the excellent Gigabyte B365M AORUS Elite motherboard which offers fantastic connectivity and is ideal for high data throughput requirements and offers superb upgrade potential. The SSD drive remains the 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 system. Add to that the inclusion of the high performance Intel 1733Mbps wireless and Bluetooth 5 and the NVidia GTX 1650 4GB video card, 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 i3-9100F offering quad cores and a 3.6GHz base frequency with 4.2GHz. 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 9th Gen Processor
3TB Storage Drive
High performance SSD
Specifications:
Processor
- Intel Core i3-9100F 3.6Ghz Quad Core CPU
- Max Turbo Frequency 4.2GHz
- 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
- 2 x M.2 sockets, 1 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
- 1 x Optical Bays, 0 free
Software
- Windows 10 Home 64-bit
- Clean install, no additional software
Chipset
- Intel B365 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 1650 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
- Intel 10/100/1000 LAN
Wireless Networking
- Intel Wireless-AC 9260
- Speeds up to 1733mbps
- Bluetooth 5.0
Power Supply
- 400 watts
Dimensions
- Height: 480mm
- Width: 210mm
- Depth: 418mm
Interfaces
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard or Mouse Port
- 2 x USB 2.0 Port (2 rear)
- 3 x USB 3.1 Port (2 front, 4 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)
- 1 x PCI-e x 1 Slots, 0 free (1 x used for wifi card)
Case
- Corsair Carbide 110Q Black Silent ATX Case
- Pre-installed low noise Black 120 mm fan
- Space for 2 additional fans at the front
- Space to accept 120 or 240 mm liquid coolers
Warranty
- 3 Year Return to Base parts and labour
- 1st 30 days collect and return at our expense
- Corsair 110Q Quiet Case
- Intel Core i3-9100F 3.6Ghz 4 Core CPU with 4.2GHz Turbo
- Gigabyte B365M AORUS ELITE mATX Motherboard with USB Type-C
- NVidia GeForce GTX 1650 4GB GPU
- 16GB DDR4 2400Mhz Memory (2x8GB)
- 512GB Intel 660P M.2 PCIe NVMe (1500MB/R, 1000MB/W)
- 3TB Seagate BarraCuda 3.5″ Hard Drive
- Delta Copper Core 95w Intel 1151 Cooler
- Contour 400W High Efficiency ATX PSU
- Gigabyte PCIe Wireless 802.11AC 1733Mbps Dual Band Wi-Fi / Bluetooth 5
- 24x SATA Internal DVDRW with M-Disk Support
- Integrated Sound Card On The Motherboard
- Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64 Bit
