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Help my friend pick parts for a PC


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So my friend wants a new desktop PC mainly for photo and video editing. He wants a 1tb SSD and 32 GB of RAM. Aside from that, I'm not sure what kind of specs are needed for photo and video editing. Any recommendations? His budget is between $1000-$1500 CAD. 

Please and Thank you!

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Does he have any components already?

 

It's a little difficult to find a lot of motherboards for the AMD offerings right now but their higher core/thread count should be a boon to video editing (thinking specifically of the 3900X if it can be managed with the budget). 

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Leaving some wiggle room in this build.  First I will assume he already has some external hard drives to store his videos.  Second unsure if he needs a monitor.  Third, if you can find out exactly what software he will be using and if he knows which software, if any, can utilize GPU-acceleration.  It might be wiser to invest more into GPU performance if it has CUDA acceleration, for example.

 

Lastly, if he can hold off for a few more weeks AMD should be releasing the cheaper B550 motherboards, where he can save a few bucks.  

 

Intel might also be a consideration if he's going to focus on Photo editing more than video editing.  But it will cost more, and right now the Ryzen 3600 and 3700X are the best bang for the buck productivity CPUs.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor  ($413.45 @ Amazon Canada) 
Motherboard: Asus PRIME X570-P ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($229.00 @ Canada Computers) 
Memory: G.Skill Aegis 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  ($159.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Storage: ADATA XPG SX8100 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  ($169.99 @ Newegg Canada Marketplace) 
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 1650 4 GB Phoenix OC Video Card  ($199.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Case: Cougar MX330 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($69.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic S12III 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  ($84.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Total: $1327.40
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-06-13 17:51 EDT-0400

 

And you can get a Windows 10 key on ebay for <$5.

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56 minutes ago, HGLatinBoy said:

whats the budget and what have you looked at already

 

here is something I pooped out should be good for photos and I guess  you can play games on it, but i wouldn't. Unfortunately PSU prices are very high for what you're getting at the moment. 

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/nK2DvW

 

You can use this as a base to modify. 

 

His budget is $1000-$1500 CAD, as mentioned in the first post.  :p When switching to the Canadian PC part picker, unfortunately that goes up to over $2000. As for gaming, he's not a gamer so I doubt he'll be doing much if any gaming on it.

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5 minutes ago, cusideabelincoln said:

Leaving some wiggle room in this build.  First I will assume he already has some external hard drives to store his videos.  Second unsure if he needs a monitor.  Third, if you can find out exactly what software he will be using and if he knows which software, if any, can utilize GPU-acceleration.  It might be wiser to invest more into GPU performance if it has CUDA acceleration, for example.

 

Lastly, if he can hold off for a few more weeks AMD should be releasing the cheaper B550 motherboards, where he can save a few bucks.  

 

Intel might also be a consideration if he's going to focus on Photo editing more than video editing.  But it will cost more, and right now the Ryzen 3600 and 3700X are the best bang for the buck productivity CPUs.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor  ($413.45 @ Amazon Canada) 
Motherboard: Asus PRIME X570-P ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($229.00 @ Canada Computers) 
Memory: G.Skill Aegis 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  ($159.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Storage: ADATA XPG SX8100 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  ($169.99 @ Newegg Canada Marketplace) 
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 1650 4 GB Phoenix OC Video Card  ($199.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Case: Cougar MX330 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($69.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic S12III 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  ($84.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Total: $1327.40
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-06-13 17:51 EDT-0400

 

And you can get a Windows 10 key on ebay for <$5.

Ooh, thanks for this. I'll ask him about the software and if he's going to focus more on photo or video editing.

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AMD is competitive/on par with Intel in Adobe products, so the 3700x is probably the best option here as the 3900x would be hard to fit in the budget.  Also it appears Adobe just recently updated Premier to offer GPU-accelerated encoding, so a decent video card makes sense for this as well as any of the GPU-accelerated effects being applied while working on a project.  I'd like to recommend a 2060 or 2070, but again those will be pushing the budget.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor  ($413.45 @ Amazon Canada) 
Motherboard: Asus PRIME X570-P ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($229.00 @ Canada Computers) 
Memory: G.Skill Aegis 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  ($159.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Storage: ADATA XPG SX8100 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  ($169.99 @ Newegg Canada Marketplace) 
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 6 GB GAMING AMP Video Card  ($328.50 @ Vuugo) 
Case: Rosewill NAUTILUS ATX Mid Tower Case  ($59.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Power Supply: EVGA 500 W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply  ($63.99 @ Mike's Computer Shop) 
Total: $1424.91
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-06-14 00:36 EDT-0400

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Well, he could drop the video card down to a 1650, possibly, and not lose much performance.  It's a bit hard to find enough testing on Adobe products to say for sure, but from what I did see is that anything more than an RTX 2060 shows diminishing returns, and when you start going slower than a 1050 Ti you lose a lot of performance.  So a GTX 1660 should provide quite the punch, and I am unclear where the GTX 1650 would land on the performance curve (a curve, because Adobe GPU performance does not scale linearly with TFLOPs).  The 1650 might be really close in performance to a 2060, or perhaps it splits the difference between a 2060 and 1050 Ti.

 

Also it's unclear how Radeon video cards will stack up, as Adobe's just released the update to utilize the integrated video encoder/decoders built into AMD and Nvidia video cards.  Historically Adobe does favor Nvidia GPUs and performs better under CUDA, as opposed to OpenCL that you have to use with Radeon graphics.  But the latest update basically brought Quicksync levels of performance to discrete GPUs when encoding the project.  Radeon video cards also typically give you more VRAM than similarly-priced Nvidia cards, which might be a consideration if he's working with ultra-high resolution videos.

 

Here's a cheap option:

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor  ($259.99 @ Memory Express) 
Motherboard: ASRock B450M/AC Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($118.75 @ Vuugo) 
Memory: G.Skill Aegis 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  ($159.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Storage: ADATA XPG SX8100 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  ($169.99 @ Newegg Canada Marketplace) 
Video Card: MSI Radeon RX 570 8 GB ARMOR OC Video Card  ($199.00 @ Canada Computers) 
Case: Rosewill FBM-X1 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  ($49.99 @ Newegg Canada) 
Power Supply: Antec VP PLUS 500 W 80+ Certified ATX Power Supply  ($59.75 @ Vuugo) 
Total: $1017.46
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-06-14 13:48 EDT-0400

 

A second-hand video would probably be the best way to bring the cost down lower.  Another way would be to find a second-hand second-generation Ryzen CPU, like the 2600, 2600X, 2700, or 2700X.  These CPUs were on fire-sale new before the pandemic struck.

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