Boaz' Post

Building a PC for Adobe Photoshop

Between the addition of cameras to smartphones and the rise of image-centric social media sites like Instagram, photography has only become more and more popular over the past couple decades. This has also meant a lot more interest in image editing and adjusting. When it comes to software for image editing, it’s Adobe Photoshop that dominates both professional and enthusiast work.

However, serious users may find that Photoshop can sometimes be a demanding program. In this article, I’ll briefly discuss the importance of each PC component when it comes to having a good experience with Photoshop.

This post will not be an example build, but rather advice on what to prioritize and what to be aware of. (If you’re looking for something more specific, with recommendations of exact parts to get for different budgets—you should check out the first section our primary guide on building a PC for image editing and graphic design.)

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Should You Buy a Gaming Laptop or Build a Gaming Desktop?

 

The prices for building a gaming desktop PC have improved over the past few months, but they might still be too high for you. In fact, they even be so high that you consider purchasing a gaming laptop instead. As the name suggests, a gaming laptop is a laptop made with gaming in mind; big companies like Razer, Dell, and MSI make lots of these nowadays. These laptops can be attractive options for more on-the-move, lower-budget, and/or younger players as they tend to be a little cheaper and a lot more portable than desktop alternatives.

In this article, I will explore if this is a viable alternative to building your own desktop. I’ll be covering a selection of important topics, starting with those that favor the laptops and transitioning toward those that favor the desktops.

This comparison will be mainly aimed at people wanting to play games on their system. You could also use this comparison for picking a system for similar workloads like video editing or 3D rendering, but the article is written with gaming in mind. Now, let’s get to it!

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Building a PC for Office Work or School

Availability and pricing issues have stirred up the PC market in general, and the GPU market in particular. But that doesn’t mean that every type of builder is affected equally!

Today, for example, we will demonstrate that it is still possible to build a computer with a good ‘bang for the buck’ and robust performance that is entirely suitable for office and school tasks.

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The Best Operating System for Your Gaming PC

windows-vs-linux-vs-steamox-operating-system-os

You just finished your brand-new gaming PC build and saw it POST. Now is the time to install an operating system. But which one should you pick? What is best for you?

There is a large variety of operating systems you can pick from, yet only a few are really suitable for gaming. The three that I consider most suitable and that I am going to compare here are Windows 10, Linux (in the form of Ubuntu), and SteamOS.

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Best Beginner’s Guide to CPU Specifications

When buying and picking your CPU, you want to get the best you can get for your money, as well as the CPU that best fits your needs. When sifting through the available CPUs to satisfy those goals, you are bombarded with numerous technical terms and specifications.

In this article, I aim to clear up what those terms mean, and (roughly speaking) how their specs translate into performance.

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The Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G Release

With the release of the Ryzen 7 5700G and the Ryzen 5 5600G, AMD have once again spiced up the CPU market. They feature similar specifications compared to their 5600x and 5700x counterparts, but have iGPUs in them too, and at a lower MSRP! The rise in price for the 5600x and 5700x shocked some people, so it is nice to see that it is going back down again.

These chips might change the market and create new possibilities for PC builders. Thus, in this article, I will discuss potential uses for these new chips, and talk about their specifications.

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Top 5 Prebuilt Computers for Gaming in 2021

With the GPU shortages continuing, some people are turning to prebuilt computers. These are pre-assembled PCs, usually sold at a slightly elevated price over buying the parts separately; thus, building your system yourself would normally be cheaper. However, prebuilt prices have generally not increased as much as GPU prices have, and because of that prebuilt PCs are suddenly an interesting option.

And even in situations where the prices of these pre-made computers have kept pace with the rest of the market, they are sometimes nevertheless one of the few reliable ways to obtain certain GPU models that are frequently out-of-stock when sought directly. So, as wild as it may seem coming from this particular website, in this article I will discuss 5 prebuilt computers that are currently worth the money (1 budget choice, 3 midrange choices, and 1 premium choice).

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Building a Workstation PC with the i9-11900K

The i9-11900K is a somewhat confusing component. On the one hand, it compares unfavorably with its own predecessor, the i9-10900K: it has 8 cores (down from its older sibling’s 10), yet has the same top speed. And indeed, benchmarks by Gamers Nexus show that performance is very similar, with the i9-11900K sometimes slightly behind its predecessor.

On the other hand, 8 cores (and 16 threads) is likely to be more than enough for the vast majority of both gaming and workstation users, 5.3 GHz is still an excellent native top speed, and the two fewer cores do make a slight positive difference in favor of cooler temperatures on the 11900K. Thus, although the core count has been ‘downgraded,’ this i9 remains a powerful processor.

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Building a Gaming PC with the i7-11700K

Intel recently launched a new lineup of chips, and one of them was the i7-11700K, an 8 core/16 threaded powerhouse with a boost clock of 5 GHz. With such specifications, this processor runs any game smoothly. As a result of the high core count, it would also be fit for workstation purposes such as video rendering.

It does have a noticeably high TDP: 125 Watts! This already tells us the processor might get a little hot under high loads. Nevertheless, the performance is astounding and makes up (slightly) for the high TDP.

In this article, we’ll be building using the new i7 to build a PC for high-tier gaming. Let’s dig in:

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