Photoshop & Lightroom

Well its up to you, we con go quad core and 580 or we can go 6 core and 580, of course the 6 core will cost more, I believe cs5 does use multi core so the 6 core should do better depending.

David,

I just had a machine built by DS primarily for digital imaging/photoshop and faced many of the same questions you are. Getting consistent information on the best way to go has been difficult but perhaps the best comes from John Nack, one of the originators of photoshop in this article. Also included are links to some informative studies done by Lloyd Chambers. Part of the problem is Photoshop is a a hodge/podge of code written at different times by different people some of it taking advantage of multiple cores and hyperthreading some of it not. I wouldn't pay too much attention to benchmarks you see on computer web sites as unless they mirror your use they're likely to be misleading. Lightroom is more uniform and does take better advantage of multiple cores.

With regard to the SSD, make sure it's large enough to serve as your scratch disk as well as the system/program disk as parts of Photoshop are poorly coded and will use the scratch disk regardless of how much memory your machine has.

Unless you're using AE or some particular plugins Photoshop still doesn't make much use of graphics cards. Maybe that will change in CS6.

I ended up going with a 2600K, a 128GB Crucial M4 and 8GB of memory (probably will go to 16 before long). I'm going to wait on the graphics card until I see what NVIDIA and AMD will be bringing out next year.

         Marty