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Need some help building my light and cheap workstation for pure photoshop and indesign only. Hope someone helps, Thanks
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4K is 8.2MP even iPhones capture 12MP images many cameras capture 16MP and 24MP images are you sure you want to discard that much detail?
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JJMack wrote
4K is 8.2MP even iPhones capture 12MP images many cameras capture 16MP and 24MP images are you sure you want to discard that much detail?
Yep. Mike, are you talking about 4K video? What versions of Photoshop and InDesign will you be using? If you are talking about 4K video, then you will need recent versions to have the CODECs, and fast drives (as Dag mentioned) and reasonably fast system to handle it. Will the video, if that's what it is, be from a GoPro or similar? Or from a Drone, and if so, which one?
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Right. Screen-sized image files don't require more than any old cheap laptop.
Assuming you're thinking of heavier lifting than that, while still on a tight budget, build something around a mid-range i5 and a 500GB M.2 SSD. Don't spend too much on the video card, that makes little difference.
M.2 SSDs are a bit expensive compared to traditional SATA SSDs, but you more than make up for that because they're crazy fast. This means you need less RAM, which is also expensive. You might even get away with only 8GB RAM, although 16 would be better.
In Photoshop, the main bottleneck is I/O - moving large amounts of data around. That's the whole memory subsystem - disks and RAM. Pure number-crunching isn't as critical.