# Best Budget Desktop?



## Ampelion (Oct 17, 2012)

I thought I wanted a laptop for Lightroom, but it seems that I could get much better performance at a lower cost from a desktop. What is the best desktop for photo editing for under $700? Does the difference between the Dell Inspiron 660 ($580, Intel i5-2320 processor, 8GB RAM, integrated graphics) and the Dell XPS 8500 ($750, Intel i7-3770, 8GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD 7570 graphics card) justify the price difference? The latter seems better, but I don't want to spend more than $1000 total and I'm planning to get an IPS monitor as well.


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## Brad Snyder (Oct 17, 2012)

In certain benchmark tests, the i7-3770 is over twice as fast as the i5-2320. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

I don't know how that translates to real-life, but Lr can be very processor intensive. Personally, I'd pay the money. Dell is usually quite configurable, see if there's a deduct for the AMD graphics card on the more expensive system, Lr doesn't really require up-scale video adapters. 

No hands on, practical experience with either processor, so my two cents is probably worth just about that much.


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