Building the Ultimate Photoshop CS6 PC.

Here is the dawn of the highly anticipated Photoshop CS6. Photoshop has always been a power hungry application which pushes the most powerful of desktops to their limits.

Even the smallest bottleneck can have your system on its knees and you sat around twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to load.

It goes without saying, the better and more powerful your PC is, and the easier it will handle the pressure put upon it by Photoshop.

Today we are going to illustrate to you the best set up for using Photoshop CS6 to its full potential.

To start with the basics, you are going to need the following: –

• A high-end processor.

• Lots of lovely Ram

• A large hard drive

• A graphics card which supports GPU-Acceleration found in CS6.

Lets have a look at these four basic in a bit more detail.

Processor

For high demand graphical applications, Intel processes truly triumph over AMD processors. With Photoshop CS6 the speed of the CPU really does make a difference, so if you want the best out of this software opt for an Intel CPU.

You also need a quick powerful CPU, so I would definitely recommend a Core i7 processor, maybe the 3.6ghz if your budget allows. This will set you back around £250 but is the core of your system. If your going to spend big on any of the computer hardware needed, then make it the processor.

RAM

To really see this software cruise along flawlessly you’re going to need RAM and plenty of it. I stress this when I say it, an absolute minimum of 8GB but anything up to 16GB or 32Gb, if your motherboard will accommodate it.

You don’t need the really quick ram associated with gaming PCs, so stick with stable high quality RAM from brands like Crucial or Kingston and you wont really go wrong. Not only will you get robust and stable memory but they also come with rock solid warranties so if the RAM goes wrong, they will replace it for you.

Storage

If you’re doing a lot of high-end graphic work your going to need plenty of storage space. This isn’t because the program itself is big, but the files, which output can be.

In an ideal world you will need four drives. I know this sounds a lot, but we are building the Ultimate CS6 PC, so four drives is the only way to get optimal performance. Ill explain why. One for your operating system, one for the your files and one for what is called the “scratch disk”.

The scratch disk is a part of the hard drive which Adobe uses as virtual memory.

You can use fewer drives if you wish, but the most common reason for performance slow down is bottlenecks and having just one disk for everything will create bottlenecks. The cost of Computer Hardware is cheap these days and especially hard drives, spending money in this area will pay off.

Graphics Card

The new Photoshop CS6 runs on Adobe new Mercury Engine which is equipped with new GPU Acceleration tools such as blur and liquefy and more wide angled effects.

To make the most of these new tools you will need a graphics card from the new NVIDIA Quadro range and these aren’t something you will find in a normal high street bought PC.

The Quadro graphics cards can be very expensive, but you will not need the top of the range, even the modest Quadro 2000 will suffice.

When you put all these together you should have the hardware which will allow you to experience the best of Photoshop CS6 in all its glory. This is a very capable piece of software which will push to Computer Hardware of today to its very limits, but the end result if something quite spectacular.