Best value PC for the amateur photographer
Updated 01/02/24.
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 slightly larger chassis able to handle a wider range of high performance processors and graphics cards and a higher performance power supply but without being too big for most. The chassis is neat and is of a professional design yet has excellent airflow to keep high performance components cool. There is also a handy SD card reader built into the top. The entry models in our range use a much smaller chassis which is not as easily upgrade-able but this slightly larger chassis used in this Best Value system offers huge upgrade potential. The GPU card is also an upgraded model being the 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 B760M DS3H AX motherboard which offers fantastic connectivity and is ideal for high data throughput requirements and offers superb upgrade potential. The SSD drive remains a high performance 1TB 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 2400Mbps wireless and Bluetooth 5.2 and the NVidia GTX 1650 4GB video card, storage increase for the HDD to 4TB 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 i3-14100F offering quad cores and a 3.5GHz base frequency with 4.7GHz turbo. 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 14th Gen Processor
4TB Storage Drive
Gigabyte B760M DS3H AX
High performance SSD
Specifications:
Processor
- Intel Core i3-14100F 3.5Ghz Quad Core CPU
- 8 Processor Threads
- Max Turbo Frequency 4.7GHz
- Cache: 12MB
- Intel Air Cooler Installed
Memory
- 16GB DDR4 3200Mhz RAM
- Dual Channel – 2 x 8GB
- Supports up to 128GB
- 4 x DIMM sockets (2 Used)
Hard Drive
- 1TB NVME M.2 SSD (2400MB/R, 1950MB/W)
- 2 x M.2 sockets, 1 free (1 used for the SSD Drive)
- 4TB Seagate BarraCuda 3.5″ Hard drive
- 4 SATA Ports, 2 free (2 Used for DVDRW & 4TB HDD)
Optical Drive
- Asus DVD Re-Writer, SATA, 24x, M-Disk Support
- 1 x Optical Bays, 0 free
Software
- Windows 11 Home 64-bit
- Clean install, no additional software
Chipset
- Intel B760 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
- Realtek® 2.5GbE LAN chip (2.5 Gbps/1 Gbps/100 Mbps)
Wireless Networking
- Intel Wireless-AX200
- Speeds up to 2400 mbps
- Bluetooth 5.2
Power Supply
- 500 watts
Dimensions
- Height: 408mm
- Width: 210mm
- Depth: 418mm
Interfaces
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard or Mouse Port
- 2 x USB 2.0 Port (2 rear)
- 5 x USB 3.1 Port (2 front, 3 rear)
- 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C Gen 2 Port (1 rear)
- 1 x RJ-45 Ethernet Port
- 3 x Audio Jacks at the rear
- 1 x Combined audio/mic Jack at the front / top
- 1 x DisplayPort 1.4 on GPU
- 1 x HDMI 2.0b on GPU
- SD Card reader built into the case at the front / top
Note the display outputs from the motherboard are disabled when a graphics card is installed
Expansion
- 1 x PCI-e x 16 Slots, 0 free (1 x Used for GPU)
- 2 x PCI-e x 1 Slots, 2 free
Case
- Coolermaster Silencio S400 Black Case
- 2 x Pre-installed low noise Black 120 mm fans,1 front & 1 rear
- Space for 2 additional fans, 1 at the front & 1 at the top
- 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
- Cooler Master Silencio S400 Case
- Intel Core i3-14100F 3.5/4.7GHz 4 Core, 8 Thread CPU
- Gigabyte B760M DS3H AX DDR4 Motherboard with Wifi
- NVidia GeForce GTX 1650 4GB GDDR5 GPU
- 16GB DDR4 3200MHz Memory (2x8GB)
- 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD (2400MB/R, 1950MB/W)
- 4TB Seagate BarraCuda 3.5″ Hard Drive
- Intel Standard CPU Cooler
- Contour 500W High Efficiency ATX PSU
- Built in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
- 24x SATA Internal DVDRW
- Built in 5.1 Sound Card
- Microsoft Windows® 11 Home
