Well, I think like the colleagues…
Big CPU, the most you can afford
16Gb... those Snipers are a joke
SSD... for the operative at least..
The graphics???... There we have the crux of the matter
I, personally... the least powerful. Save there and spend it on CPU, RAM or motherboard...
If it's only Photoshop... WATCH OUT....
Although there are many plugins that use CUDA if available, 99% of mortals don't use it...
The video issue is "different". The graphics acceleration is important for certain things... and here I give you my assessment due to my experience...
Premiere (I don't know if the rest of the programs do it) takes advantage of CUDA and OpenCL. Although there are "official" cards for that, any will do...
They had always said that CUDA was better than OpenCL... I think the opposite. The truth is that CUDA was better because it was the ONLY one before OpenCL.
The reality... My reality. My equipment is a q6600 with 6Gb of DDR2 ram. A job that took my CPU more than 8 hours to encode... a "humble" ATI 5850 took an hour and a half in OpenCL....
For a special job I was able to buy a card with decent CUDA. I'm talking about a GTX 760 of 2gb.
The same job took almost two hours and a quarter :wall::wall:
What do I mean by this???.... that if you buy an NVIDIA graphics card with many CUDA cores you will have good acceleration in that regard... but get into more than 300 € of graphics... when an ATI 5850 is going to do the same for about 60 € on the high side second-hand
Looking at the new ATIs... I would go for an 7950 before a low R9
Anyway, I hope to be of help.
Regards