Originally Posted by
scaryjim
Excellent plan :)
I think you really need to nail down how compute-intensive her PS workflow is. Looking at the etsy it's mostly manual retouching and simple effects. I suspect the only system bottlenecks to that will be memory and IO, so plenty of RAM (possibly worth considering 16GB) and an SSD should help more than a fast CPU (imo; worth remembering photo editing isn't my speciality ;) ).
I'll be honest, I'm struggling to see any good reason to spend money on anything faster than AM1, and the money saved could go towards a new monitor, or camera, or a host of other things (I suspect you've for lots of extraneous expenses to meet having recently moved house, for instance).