How to configure your workstation for Affinity Photo

With the image editing program Affinity Photo, the British company Serif has succeeded in developing a real alternative to Photoshop. The user interface is similar, the editing options meet all professional requirements. Affinity Photo enables you to make changes to an image without overwriting the original data. The original image is saved separately, as are all sequences of changes.

The right processor for Affinity Photo 1.10

We recommend an Intel Xeon 4- or 6-core processor with a high clock rate of approx. 4.00 GHz in Turbo Boost. Alternatively, we can recommend an Intel i7 or Intel i9 with a high MHZ frequency. As a rule of thumb, the faster the CPU, the faster your workstation. When choosing a processor, also consider the use of other programs. If you plan to do video editing as well as image editing, then look for a high-frequency CPU with many cores and a high clock rate. AMD offers a real alternative with the Ryzen Threadripper.

speed up your memory for Affinity 1.10

For simple image editing with Affinity Photo, 16 GB of RAM is quite sufficient. If you plan to edit high-resolution RAW images with multiple layers, we recommend using 32 GB RAM with 4x8 GB modules. We fuel our business workstation in Quad Channel mode to ensure optimal power consumption. You can view the RAM usage during an Affinity project in the Task Manager under the *Power* tab in %. Choose a Business Workstation with 8 memory banks to be able to upgrade to 64 GB at any time at a reasonable price.

The right graphic card for Affinity Photo 1.10

Affinity Photo does not place any major demands on the graphics card. We tested Affinity Photo with a low-profile GPU, an NVIDIA Quadro P2000 with 5GB GDDR5 VRAM, and a high-end profile graphics card, an NVIDIA Geforce RTX A4000 with 16GB GDDR6 VRAM, and found no significant difference. Update the graphics driver regularly.  We install the latest NVIDIA graphics card driver on our business workstations. There is a known issue when using older versions. For starters, we recommend using an NVIDIA Quadro A2000 with 6GB GDDR6 VRAM. A good price-performance ratio is offered by an NVIDIA Geforce 3060 as Founders Edition with a quiet ball bearing fan. For larger projects and complex video editing, we recommend an NVIDIA Quadro RTX A4000 with 16GB GDDR6 VRAM. AMD offers a Radeon Pro W6600 with 8GB VRAM as a base and a Radeon Pro W6800 with 32GB GDDR6 VRAM for the performance and high-end range.

faster hard disk access for Affinity Photo 1.10

For the use of Affinity Photo and to shorten the loading times of your programs significantly, we recommend the use of Solid State hard disks. Since SSD hard disks do not require a magnetic disk, they are pleasantly quiet. Another advantage is the lifespan. M.2 NVME SSD hard disks are able to handle more write cycles than HDDs. Due to our positive experiences we rely on Samsung SSD of the EVO and PRO series. We  recommend Samsung 970 Evo plus alternatively a Samsung 980 Pro.