Is this rig decent for Photoshop/Lightroom?

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Augray37

Augray37

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May 4, 2011
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I'm thinking of selling my old gaming PC rig to a friend who is really into photography, as she currently uses a really old Pentium dual-core laptop, 2GB of RAM, etc. (frighteningly slow). She uses mostly Photoshop/Lightroom. Here are the relevant specs...

Mobo: Biostar TA880GB+ AM3
CPU: Phenom II X4 955 (will probably OC to 3.6 GHz or so, higher than stock, not so high that she has to watch temps and clean it out very often)
GPU: I'm going to switch out my 7870 XT and put in an HD 6570 or GT 630 or something
RAM: 16GB DDR3 1333
HDD: 500GB Samsung 7200RPM (she has external drives for storing stuff)

Another question, if this is worth selling to her (for $100 or so i guess, she's a good friend so I don't care too much about the price), will she have to buy new licenses for Photoshop/Lightroom? or can she just uninstall them and reinstall them on this PC? I honestly know nothing about Photoshop/Lightroom and if this old gaming PC is even worth the trouble to move everything over. Thanks!
 
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bambiboom
Augray,

Your AMD Phenom 955 system should be very good for Photoshop /Lightroom- certainly better than the dual core laptop you describe. The more important advantage would be if she will also switches from the laptop monitor to a desktop.

Photoshop is still mainly single-threaded, and effects processing CPU-oriented, but rendering can use the 4- cores and the 16GB RAM allows several applications running at once- very common when doing imaging work.

Adobe products have been for awhile been CUDA accelerated and seem to get along better with NVIDIA graphics cards. If you were thinking of a new GT 630, for about the same cost, you might consider a used GTX 650- 384 CUDA cores to 96, better bandwidth and etc.

As far as I know, your...
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bambiboom

bambiboom

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Apr 7, 2012
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Augray,

Your AMD Phenom 955 system should be very good for Photoshop /Lightroom- certainly better than the dual core laptop you describe. The more important advantage would be if she will also switches from the laptop monitor to a desktop.

Photoshop is still mainly single-threaded, and effects processing CPU-oriented, but rendering can use the 4- cores and the 16GB RAM allows several applications running at once- very common when doing imaging work.

Adobe products have been for awhile been CUDA accelerated and seem to get along better with NVIDIA graphics cards. If you were thinking of a new GT 630, for about the same cost, you might consider a used GTX 650- 384 CUDA cores to 96, better bandwidth and etc.

As far as I know, your friend can transfer her Adobe licenses to the new computer by contacting Adobe and first de-activating the software on the laptop, uninstall, and then installing and re-activating on the new system. I've never done this and have heard Adobe doesn't make it easy nor fast, but I would think of it as saving $600 for perhaps half an hour's work.

Cheers,

BambiBoom


[Dell Precision T5400 > 2X Xeon X5460 quad core @ 3.16GHz, 16 GB ECC , Quadro FX 4800 (1.5GB), WD RE4 / Segt Barcd 500GB > Windows 7 Ult > AutoCad, Revit, Solidworks, Sketchup, Adobe CS MC, Corel Technical Designer, WP Office, MS Office]
 
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