Which Is The Best Desktop PC For Photo Editing?

When I wrote about the best laptop for photo editing a month ago, several readers asked for advice on desktops. As you already know, you want the fastest processor, the most memory, and the fastest hard drives and SSDs that you can afford. The problem is balancing the different requirements.

However, buying or building a desktop PC to run Adobe Lightroom is not the same as buying one for general-purpose use. General purpose computing rarely stresses today’s processors. It’s often better to spend your money on more memory, a fast SSD, and a high-quality screen and keyboard.

Unfortunately, Lightroom is still mostly dependent on the power of the processor, so it’s best to go for a quad-core Intel Core i7, if possible. There’s currently no great advantage to having more than four cores, though such chips will benchmark faster because they can turbo-boost two cores to higher clock speeds.

Memory is the next most important thing: 16GB is OK, but more is better, and pros want 32GB or more. Of course, it depends on what you do, and how quickly you need to do it. You can run Lightroom in 8GB, but you will start to run into problems when combining HDR images and so on.

Lightroom also likes fast disk drives, so it helps to have an SSD. RAW files take up a lot of space, but big SSDs are expensive. The compromise is to run the program from an affordable SSD while having a big traditional hard drive to store images.

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Author: Jack Schofield