Swerv, what sort of stuff does she do on photoshop? I appreciate you may-may not know what I am on about If its just editing the average digital camera photo then an off the shelf dell should be ok. But if she uses a digital slr camera or scans in large files such as a4 photos at a high quality(1200dpi) then they can come in at a minimum of 400mb uncompressed. My quad core takes time when applying filters to images of this size.

It all depends on how serious she is with photoshop as that determines how well the system will perform in the roles it will do. I used to work with photoshop quite a lot in my old job and know how it can really bring a system to its knees when you have more than one image open at high resolutions.


GTI-ITG, I would agree an off the shelf system will be fine for the average photoshop user that edits 3 and 4 mega pixel camera photos. If anybody is a proper photoshop user and im not talking about the change the colour of my wheels-car stuff then an off the shelf system can struggle.

Just to add: I have just done a test, I loaded a BMW e90 M3 1920x1200 jpeg Photo into photoshop and it took 6.71mb ram after it was uncompressed. This is a typical digital camera image and loads quicky due to the camera compressing the image when its taken. II then scanned in a letter at 1200dpi and it took 403MB uncompressed! At this point its worth pointing out that I had used 72% of 2GB of Ram and flipping the image horizontal took 30 seconds. I imported the 1080p BMW image into the letter and my ram usage went to 87% of 2GB! When i saved to a Jpeg using medium compression the final file was 82MB in size.

I hope this essay gives a little understanding how complex photoshop is and the requirements it can take. Its a program for professionals and through p2p downloads has found its way into family homes when they should really use something less complex such as paint shop pro. I hope you this has given a little insight into photoshop..