Photo editing PC

[colmo]

Thanks Thorsson for spotting my errors.

To make up for it, here's a slightly more relevant review of Photoshop CS 3 on the E7200.

I've heard of the separate scratch disk idea, but am unsure if buying a new drive for the job would be worth it - it's perfect for those old, smaller drives we seem to accumulate over time. You might even be able to create a RAMdisk scratch disk, if you opt for a whopping amount of RAM:

Some apparently useful threads I found on this from 5 minutes of googling:
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/...howtopic=25705
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/.../t-279194.html
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index....pid;1277378924

[Thorsson]

Doesn't that show that (un-overclocked) the Q6600 performs noticeably better than the E7200?

Regarding the disks then my thought was that a 400Gb windows/general/program + 640Gb Photoshop might be a better buy than a single 1Tb.

But more memory is definitely king. That's always been the case with PS.

[colmo]

Doesn't that show that (un-overclocked) the Q6600 performs noticeably better than the E7200?

It does indeed - I figured the OP would work that out for himself

It makes me feel pretty good about the Q6600 I bought last year, it has aged very well

For my own particular needs, I figured more cores was the way to go (I'm a 64-bit Linux user and tend to run lots of apps at the same time), but for a light user, that E7200 looks like a very good chip for the cash; the triple core AMD 8650 is going for similar money, but Intel has nearly always had the better of it for Photoshop and other commercial Windows applications.