[davef]

Hi Gooshin. Here's my $0.02 worth.

Raw processing and editing eats CPUs and memory. My experience is with Photoshop, ACR, Corel and Bibble. I doubt the others are much different as they need to do the same calculations.

See if your software will exploit multi-core CPUs. Likely needs OS and application support to truly exploit.

A decent graphics card is important but it doesn't need to be an ultra fast gaming one. You do need to be able to fine tune the colour and gamma to get proper colour balance.

If it's Windows, I expect most of the developers will program graphics via DirectX API rather programming the GPU directly. I assume the MacOS has a similar API.

If you want to get away without a cooling fan, you'll need a top drawer CPU fan and a high quality power supply. Look for the low noise ones -- they make a huge difference. Alternative 2 is to look at liquid cooling for the CPU and GPU. They are pricey but can be effective.

Try to get by with one hard drive in the case. They give off a huge amount of heat that needs to be removed from the case.

Consider a notebook (Wintel or Mac) and use you existing rig for back end storage as well as gaming. Won't have as much raw horsepower but the performance gap (video and CPU) has closed noticably in the past couple of years as has the price gap.

Dave