Moniter and graphics card advice.

I'm looking to upgrade my moniter (Windows 10) and graphics card so any and all advice on what to get would be appreciated. The computer is NEVER used for gaming and is my primary photo processor using Lightroom, Photoshop and Photolab.

canuck257 said:

I'm looking to upgrade my moniter (Windows 10) and graphics card so any and all advice on what to get would be appreciated. The computer is NEVER used for gaming and is my primary photo processor using Lightroom, Photoshop and Photolab.

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Which bus(es) does your computer support (e.g. PCI, PCI-e 1x, PCI-e 16x)? Also, what sort of budget do you have?

Paul, PCI Express 3.0 x 16, PCI Express 2.0 x 16, whatever that means!! So many graphics cards seem to be designed for gaming and appear to have expensive features that I don't need. The trouble is, I don't know what features I do need and which ones I don't. As for budget, midway between reasonable and stupid money! My current monitor is a 24" but I would like to go to a 27" with as high a resolution as possible.

canuck257 said:

Paul, PCI Express 3.0 x 16, PCI Express 2.0 x 16, whatever that means!!

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That tells you what sort of graphics card the motherboard in your computer will accept. Those specs are good. You can use most any of the current graphics cards.


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canuck257 said:

So many graphics cards seem to be designed for gaming and appear to have expensive features that I don't need. The trouble is, I don't know what features I do need and which ones I don't. As for budget, midway between reasonable and stupid money! My current monitor is a 24" but I would like to go to a 27" with as high a resolution as possible.

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For your purposes something like this GTX 1051 Ti would work well. It's less than $200 which is not bad at all when it comes a decent, discrete video card. Don't worry about the "Gaming" mention. The 1050 Ti doesn't require any additional power connectors (which is nice) and will run off a 300W power supply (which is also nice because just about any PC on the market will use a power supply in 350W to 450W range). Spending more money would get you more memory, and/or faster clock speeds, and probably more stuff Photoshop won't care two hoots about. Photoshop works best on a well-balanced system, meaning while the graphics card IS important, the total amount system memory (RAM) the system has and how good a processor (CPU) it has is also important to how well, and how fast, Photoshop runs overall.

So, in short, the 1050 Ti is ONE solid choice among dozens (or more) of video cards that will handily do what you're asking... Which is power through processing in Photoshop and do it well. Don't come crying to me when you find this card won't run Battle Toads at 150 fps at max res on your 60", 8K monitor.

And speaking of monitors, that's a whole nuther kettle of fish and I'm not really up to speed on which monitors, currently, are particularly good for photo editing. I'd look for one that allows for easy color adjustment because calibrating your monitor is essential in my opinion and some monitors have much finer control over color output and are simply easier to calibrate than others.