There comes a day when you realise a laptop doesn’t cut it and you need a desktop PC for the optimal setup for creative work. While laptops offer portability, desktop builds provide more power and capacity for your money, plus the flexibility to upgrade as needed. The challenge is knowing what to choose.
Your needs will depend on the type of work you do and the hardware requirements of the software you use. A light 2D drawing app might work reasonably well with a lower-spec processor and graphics card, but the same setup will leave you tearing your hair out if you want to add video effects to 4K footage in DaVinci Resolve.
There are three main internals to consider when choosing a PC for creative work:
- The central processing unit (CPU) is the heart of the computer, reading and interpreting commands from programs. Multi-core processors like Intel’s Core i5 to i9 and AMD’s Ryzen 7 or 9 provide high clock speeds and can handle multiple simultaneous computations for superior performance.
- The graphics processing unit (GPU, or graphics card) is massively important for creative work since it’s responsible for rendering images, videos, animations, and transitions. Video editors, 3D artists, and animators in particular will want to spend a little more for smoother performance. Programs like DaVinci Resolve and Photoshop are optimised to take advantage of hardware acceleration advances provided by NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs.
- Random access memory (RAM) is vital for multitasking, and too little will slow your computer down and cause software to crash. Most creatives will want at least 16GB, while 32GB is preferable for video editing or animation.
How to choose?
The challenge with picking out all these components yourself is that you need to make sure everything is compatible. You’ll need a motherboard with the right socket for your CPU and you also need to consider cooling and the right case size to fit everything in – and then there’s the process of installing an operating system and troubleshooting if things don’t work.
Choosing pre-built PCs cuts the time spent on this and means you can get right to it. SCAN has a wide range of PCs configured with creatives in mind, with Windows installed ready to go, and options for every budget.
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Whatever your needs and budget, there's a ready-built PC for you that will provide a reliable and upgradable setup for years to come. This allows you to forget about problem solving and researching tech configurations and to get on with the job of creating. Choose your pre-built, creative-ready PC at SCAN today.
