GroovyGeek Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
If you are not price sensitive and know that you will never ever want to do any upgrades to the machine, and/or are not necessarily tech oriented get an M2. The myth that Apple machines are more user-friendly than a comparably configured PC is just that, a myth, but that is not a fight worth fighting here or anywhere else.
Since you are looking for a photo editing machine you are likely not looking for portability. If you are so inclined you can build your own, which will be expandable for another 10 years. My recommendation is
1) Quality full sized tower case, for example Fractal Design
2) i7 processor, at least 8 cores or equivalent AMD
3) quality motherboard, ASUS makes some good ones, at least 4 DDR slots, at least 4 PCIe slots, support for at least 6 SATA and 2 NVME devices
4) quality fan, Noctua or similar, stay away from liquid coolers
5) power supply with at least 200W headroom over your current configuration, EVGA makes good ones
6) Nvidia 3xxx card. Stay away from Radeon, see below
4) At least 32G of memory, preferably 64G. Whatever your choice is, buy it as two sticks, not 4
5) Two NVME SSDs 1T+, one for boot and one for images that are in "active use". Samsung 970 EVO plus is fine for non-professional use. Plenty on Amazon used in like new condition
5) At least two 7200+ RPM HDDs, 4T+ for nightly backup of the SSDs and storage of "semi archival" stuff, e.g., older images
You will have a top notch rig that you can upgrade for not a lot of money 5 years from now.
Some notes:
Don't overspend on a CPU. No need to go with i9, but I would not go with an i5 either. Don't skimp on the fan unless you are a fan of fan noise. Noctuas are pricey for a fan but whisper quiet. Ditto for the case, you would be surprised how important that is to ensure upgradeability. The RAW denoising in the latest versions of PS is extremely GPU intensive and is optimized for Nvidia Cuda cores, hence my recommendation to go with that instead of Radeon. These days there are lots of used GPU cards on Amazon in like new condition. I recently bought a MSI RTX 3070 $400
I built a similar configuration to what I recommend in 2017. It worked fine till the latest update to PS with RAW denoising when the 1060 GPU showed its age. Spent $400 on the new card, $80 on another 32G of RAM, $150 on two NVME SSDs and now I have a machine that is good for at least another 5 years. My motherboard had the slots required for the GPU, the power supply had the headroom, and most importantly, full size case had space for it (if you have not seen high end GPU cards recently, you are in for a surprise how freakin big and power hungry they are.
Or you can buy an M2 laptop now and then another one 5 years from now.
|