Validation for a new computer

[Cristobal]

I own a 10 years old Dell Inspiron 3847 desktop with a 21.5 inches monitor; working with Lightroom and Denoise requires to be patient and I was never able to work with new Lightroom features as sharpening; this desktop support no graphics card; all my photos are on a Samsung T7 Shield external disk. My goal is to upgrade to be able to post-process easily without bugs. I made some research on internet and selected a Dell Inspiron 3020 desktop with a 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-13700 (30 MB cache, 16 cores, 24 threads, 2.10 GHz to 5.10 GHz Turbo, a NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3050, 8 GB GDDR6a graphics card, 16 GB: 1 x 16 GB, DDR4, 3200 MT/s and 1 TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD storage. I selected a Dell ultrasharp 24 inch monitor U2723 QE for a budget of 3 000 canadian dollars. As I am new to computers, I am speaking to the specialists that you are to obtain a validation and the confirmation that I made a good choice.

 

[Butlerkid]

Have you already purchased the new computer?

 

[Cristobal]

Have you already purchased the new computer?

Not yet!

 

[AlexY]

If it were me, I'd take a look at this desktop from Lenovo...here's a link to Best Buy here in Canada:
https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/produc...HyLmnwY-MUizopgXyRRoCYlIQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
It's not an i7 chip, but I think that an i5 cpu will be fast enough for photo processing; the graphics card is somewhat more important. The legion tower computers have excellent cooling and there is lots of scope for expansion - more memory, more internal drives. Best of all. it's only $1200 cdn, so with a dell 24 ' ultra sharp monitor, you'll only need around $2000.
I have a legion tower 5i with the same i5 chip and a 3050 nVidia card and it is very fast. As a bonus, the computer has programmable led lights, which my cat seems to enjoy, and which can be switched off when the cat's not around.
The Lenovo computers get very good reviews and I chose it as I thought that the case and motherboard were better than what I could get from HP or Dell at this point in time.
Something to think about - good luck with your purchase - you'll find that with an SSD drive, your boot times will be around 30 seconds.!
cheers,
Alex

 

[Cristobal]

If it were me, I'd take a look at this desktop from Lenovo...here's a link to Best Buy here in Canada:
https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/produc...HyLmnwY-MUizopgXyRRoCYlIQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
It's not an i7 chip, but I think that an i5 cpu will be fast enough for photo processing; the graphics card is somewhat more important. The legion tower computers have excellent cooling and there is lots of scope for expansion - more memory, more internal drives. Best of all. it's only $1200 cdn, so with a dell 24 ' ultra sharp monitor, you'll only need around $2000.
I have a legion tower 5i with the same i5 chip and a 3050 nVidia card and it is very fast. As a bonus, the computer has programmable led lights, which my cat seems to enjoy, and which can be switched off when the cat's not around.
The Lenovo computers get very good reviews and I chose it as I thought that the case and motherboard were better than what I could get from HP or Dell at this point in time.
Something to think about - good luck with your purchase - you'll find that with an SSD drive, your boot times will be around 30 seconds.!
cheers,
Alex

Thank you very much for your recommandation; I have seen that it's a gaming PC; personnaly, I don,t play any game on my computer but may be that features we are looking for in photos editing are the same than for games?

 

[AlexY]

Thank you very much for your recommandation; I have seen that it's a gaming PC; personnaly, I don,t play any game on my computer but may be that features we are looking for in photos editing are the same than for games?

You're welcome, and you are correct - most of the features found in gaming computers - good graphics and ssd drives - are what is needed for photo processing. I've been buying gaming computers for my photography work as I found that the computer I was using for music production didn't have the graphic capability that I needed and low to mid range gaming computers did and were attractively priced, especially if you can wait for either black friday or back to school sales.
I don't use mine for gaming either - just general finances, email, music production and photographic processing.....
Dell, HP and Lenovo are brands I've purchased over the years and I have no complaints with either of them. What I'm finding it harder to discover is the possibility to expand the capabilities of a computer that I'm interested in. Can you add more Ram, and if so how many slots does the motherboard have? Are there spare slots to add more HD's or SSD's . How big is the power supply....and so on.

 

[Clough91]

Sorry to drop in in this conversation, I’m also looking for new computer. My laptop cannot run anything with adobe efficiently anymore says it’ll take 25-30 min to run denoise in Lightroom, takes a long time to run though pictures and cull. I’m looking for a laptop not a desktop and have a couple questions will 16 gigs of ram be enough? Most conversations I’ve read through recommend 32 atleast. The graphics card the laptop I’m looking at is a rtx 4060 with 8 gigs of memory since from what I’ve been reading adobe is relying more on that then ram? Here’s link to laptop I’m looking at.

MSI Katana 15 15.6

MSI Katana 15 Gaming Laptop 15.6" FHD Intel i7-12650H GeForce RTX 4060 16GB 1TB SSD Windows 11 Home, B12VFK-237CA

www.canadacomputers.com

 

[sportmaster]

I recently bought a MSI desktop for $1250 USD. Works great

• Windows 11 Pro
• Intel® Core™ i7-13700F 2.1 GHz
• NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060 Ti 8G GDDR6
• 16GB DDR5 (2 x 8GB)
• 2 x 1 TB M.2 PCIe SSD

I have since added 64GB of ram

 

[Cristobal]

Sorry to drop in in this conversation, I’m also looking for new computer. My laptop cannot run anything with adobe efficiently anymore says it’ll take 25-30 min to run denoise in Lightroom, takes a long time to run though pictures and cull. I’m looking for a laptop not a desktop and have a couple questions will 16 gigs of ram be enough? Most conversations I’ve read through recommend 32 atleast. The graphics card the laptop I’m looking at is a rtx 4060 with 8 gigs of memory since from what I’ve been reading adobe is relying more on that then ram? Here’s link to laptop I’m looking at.

MSI Katana 15 15.6

MSI Katana 15 Gaming Laptop 15.6" FHD Intel i7-12650H GeForce RTX 4060 16GB 1TB SSD Windows 11 Home, B12VFK-237CA

www.canadacomputers.com

No problem, your are welcome! Thank you for your infos!

 

[AlexY]

Sorry to drop in in this conversation, I’m also looking for new computer. My laptop cannot run anything with adobe efficiently anymore says it’ll take 25-30 min to run denoise in Lightroom, takes a long time to run though pictures and cull. I’m looking for a laptop not a desktop and have a couple questions will 16 gigs of ram be enough? Most conversations I’ve read through recommend 32 atleast. The graphics card the laptop I’m looking at is a rtx 4060 with 8 gigs of memory since from what I’ve been reading adobe is relying more on that then ram? Here’s link to laptop I’m looking at.

MSI Katana 15 15.6

MSI Katana 15 Gaming Laptop 15.6" FHD Intel i7-12650H GeForce RTX 4060 16GB 1TB SSD Windows 11 Home, B12VFK-237CA

www.canadacomputers.com

My system is a desktop and has 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a nVidia RTX 3050 graphics card with 8GB of memory and it does just fine. I don't run lightroom anymore, but use Photolab instead and the Deep Prime XD noise routine takes around 10s on a 25 to 30MB raw file. I found that lightroom's denoise (when I had it, v12.4 I think) took 50 to 130s for a similar raw file and the results were often not as good as those from Photolab to my eyes. Perhaps it is better now?
I looked at the MSI specs and it looks like it should be fine for your needs - better than my desktop for sure, though I always worry about cooling in a laptop, as in my experience , they don't last as long as a desktop......
YMMV,
Alex

 

[KurtH]

I recently bought a MSI desktop for $1250 USD. Works great

• Windows 11 Pro
• Intel® Core™ i7-13700F 2.1 GHz
• NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060 Ti 8G GDDR6
• 16GB DDR5 (2 x 8GB)
• 2 x 1 TB M.2 PCIe SSD

I have since added 64GB of ram

Good specs, especially the RAM. I think the 4060Ti is plenty GPU but who knows what will be needed (hardware wise) with all the future updates.