Best (budget?) PC for using Photoshop etc

RussboyG

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Hi everyone,

(Very) part time poster on here but thought I’d come back to ask you some questions.

My partner works from home and our home desktop PC can’t handle the workload anymore with an old i3 3225 processor & 8gb RAM. We need to upgrade and ideally, I want to buy off the shelf for under £400 (if possible) or near as possible.

To give you an idea of what she uses that is processor heavy:

Photoshop
Adobe InDesign

Ideally I want an SSD for the O/S

Questions:
  1. What level processor should I be looking for, i5, better or equivalent?
  2. 16GB RAM or more?
  3. Should we get a separate graphics card?
There’s probably more I need to consider but that will do for starters and if anyone has links to spec PC’s for sale (new only with warranty) then that would be great, thanks all.

Russ
 
Your current PC isn't particularly slow, so what's it struggling with specifically?
 
Both photoshop and Adobe InDesign have minimum computing requirements which are not inconsiderable.
as you say
16GB RAM
An intel Corei5 or Ryzen equivalent
An external GPU
An 256GB SSD with 1TB HDD secondary storage or 1TB SSD

You will need to raise your budget considerably if you want to avoid performance issues you are getting currently
To buy off the shelf from a big brand such as HP or Dell would cost upward of £700-£800, more likely £1000. You could also try system builders such as PCspecialist, Chillblast who do ready to ship PCs
 
Thanks.

Yes, she's already looking around £600 now.

Looks like systems can be had for around that price with recent version of i5, 16gb and SSD from laptops direct, ebuyer etc.

Not worried about OS as I can and a key is <£20.
 

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