Questions about RAM and building a PC

[Jock]

My stepdad, who is a photographer, wants a new computer for photo and (very little) video editing. He said he'd be willing to pay around 600 euros for it. I've no idea what you need for smoother photo editing (opening many pictures in PS seems to be his bane).
His current PC is pretty old, but it has 8GB RAM (DDR2 I think) and some Intel quad core 2.4 MHz. He wants something better.

If someone could give any advice on parts, I'd be grateful.



I'm looking to buy more RAM for my own PC but I'm confused about the frequencies they're running on currently. Does this mean I have 667MHz RAM? Would it be worth to buy another 4GB stick or just get a higher frequency one entirely?

Spoiler

Thanks in advance.

 

[Jhessail]

Going from 4gb to 8gb is definitely more helpful than the frequency increase - which might not be supported by your motherboard.

 

[Leifr Eiríksson]

For photo-editing he wants to be stuffing as much RAM and CPU power into his budget as possible.

 

[Jock]

For photo-editing he wants to be stuffing as much RAM and CPU power into his budget as possible.

How important will the graphics card be?

 

[SkyTime]

Well an integrated video card would most likely serve him just fine. In other words not that important.

I don't know much about parts suitable for the purposes of editing and such but I keep hearing that an i7 works very well for that, probably due to the hyperthreading (just realized that a cheaper AMD with more cores could serve the same purpose)? Idk, but the low-end i7's shouldn't be too far from the budget so you might want to take a look at them. Also, RAM.

Regarding your RAM, adding in another of the sticks you currently have instead of upgrading may turn out to be the better option, it just depends on what your mobo supports.

I hope my rambling is of some use 

 

[havoc]

Integrated graphics will be fine. At work we run all our ACAD and design machines on integrated graphics, with 8GB of 1600mhz RAM and a Quad i5 and they all run really well.

 

[Splintert]

For multithreaded applications on a budget, I would go for an AMD FX 8xxx processor as it is comparable to an i7's multithread performance at a much much much lower cost. Then you can get a little more RAM in there or even a low end GPU just to smooth things a little bit with the money you saved.

8GB is the lowest amount of RAM I can recommend, 16GB is going to begin becoming more common as well.

You mentioned load times, you could also go for an SSD of 128GB or so, perhaps 256GB if they're reasonably priced. The load time difference is unbelievable.