My girlfriend needs to upgrade her stationary PC that she uses mostly for drawing in Krita and some video editing. OS is Ubuntu. The computer will not be used for gaming.

I'd be grateful for some input on which components to prioritize. I know she needs a lot of RAM, as her workflow means a whole lot of layers and frames. But what else is important? Is the speed of the RAM important? Does the graphics card matter at all if there's no 3D work involved? If it matters, which graphics card to buy for 2D work like Krita? And for CPU, AMD or Intel? Obviously there will be an SSD for storage.

Krita 4 makes much better use of many cores than before, so that's important. The most important thing is lots of preferably fast memory. The GPU doesn't matter so much, though Intel's have horrible opengl drivers on Windows. Performance-wise, they are just fine.

As Boudewijn mentions, multi core for sure, try anything 6 cores and up, as it will last performing over the years, I personally like amd, but having only two brands to choose doesn't leaves much to be said from them. also I wouldn't go for anything under 3.0Ghz. the more the merrier. affordability here may be the braking point.

Lots of ram along doesn't equals performance, quality and speed is a key, although on prebuilt pcs, you don't really have much choice, in fact, if you are not building your on pc, buying a branded box, go for the processor first, from there just check what else is available with it.

GPU, if you guys use linux (like you mentioned), you likely want a nvidia card, will prevent you from headaches, a low entry will suffice, NOTE: unless you must use wayland right away, where proprietary nvidia is not really a good option unlike intel.

Thanks for the feedback, both of you.

GPU, if you guys use linux (like you mentioned), you likely want a nvidia card, will prevent you from headaches

Would integrated Intel graphics (say, a i7-8700 K with a UHD Graphics 630 GPU) be significantly worse than a dedicated NVidia card for this kind of usage?

By the way, reading my post again, one thing struck me: We are using a decent amount of money on the hardware to use with (mostly) one particular piece of software, but spending no money on that software itself. Why should Intel and others get all the rewards for the work done by Krita developers? That doesn't seem right. I will add an item on the budget for a donation to the Krita organization.

Lene-Marih??ne wrote:Thanks for the feedback, both of you.

GPU, if you guys use linux (like you mentioned), you likely want a nvidia card, will prevent you from headaches

Would integrated Intel graphics (say, a i7-8700 K with a i7-8700 K GPU) be significantly worse than a dedicated NVidia card for this kind of usage?

On Linux, yes, that's quite enough. Nvidia is more dependable, but the Intel drivers on Linux work fine with Krita. I've got several systems, as a developer, some nvidia, some intel, and I never notice the difference.

Lene-Marih??ne wrote:By the way, reading my post again, one thing struck me: We are using a decent amount of money on the hardware to use with (mostly) one particular piece of software, but spending no money on that software itself. Why should Intel and others get all the rewards for the work done by Krita developers? That doesn't seem right. I will add an item on the budget for a donation to the Krita organization.

Thanks!