PC for photography- €1000 budget

sink

My mate who is a professional photographer asked me to help build a PC for photo processing. He will be mainly using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3. He also might be interested in playing a few games on it.

I don't know whether these applications uses hyperthreading or not and I also heard a rumour that they work better with Nvidia GPU's, is this true?

I'm thinking of a 2500K/2600K with either a 560ti or 6950 and at least 16gb ram and a 64gb SSD & 2TB HDD.

deconduo

This would do:

Total build cost: €931.54 + €30 shipping
Club3D Geforce GTX560 Ti, 1024MB €187.77
ASRock P67 Pro3 (B3), Sockel 1155, ATX €85.67
Crucial M4 64GB SSD 6,4cm (2,5") €93.44
FRACTAL DESIGN Gehäuse DEFINE R3 Black Pearl €89.75
Samsung EcoGreen F4 2000GB, SATA II (HD204UI) 8,9cm (3,5") €60.89
2 x 8GB-Kit G.Skill RipJaws-X PC3-10667U CL9 €45.09
Super-Flower Amazon 80Plus 550W €52.30
Samsung SH-222AB bare schwarz SATA €16.79
Intel Core i7-2600K Box, LGA1155 €254.75

Monotype

Photoshop doesn't use much GPU power - whether AMD or nVidia. CPU seems to be the main influence with drive speed/RAM becoming important with large files.

Cuddlesworth

As above ram and hard-drives are important. I would concentrate more on having three to four drives and plenty of ram. One drive for boot, one for raw photos and one for processed photos(maybe in a Raid 1 for redundancy). That would mean his OS drive stays quick while creating and rendering large image files and the process itself is quick because its a direct transfer from one to the other.