CPU and GPU for graphic designer?

[Gerpur]

A friend of mine needs a new computer for graphic design only. He uses After effects, maya, photoshop, bridge and indesign if that says anything

I was mainly wondering about cpu, gpu and maybe amount of ram needed. Budget is about £1000-£1500 and he only needs the computer with case and OS.

Would i7 2600k be enough or something like i7-3820 much better? I was thinking about 16GB ram and something like GTX 560 as gpu. Any of these programs favour Nvidia over AMD?

All comments appreciated since I have more knowledge about gaming computers

 

[Gerpur]

Based on my experience building a PC for my missus (freelance graphic designer/illustrator) and doing some design stuff at work using Adobe CS...

Video card isn't all that important at all. CPU also doesn't matter as much as you might think - the wife has a 3.2GHz i3 and it flies....she loves it. Any current med/high end CPU will be fine. If there's one area I would spend money on it would be a fast hard disk and SSD - SSD for OS and Apps and then a big/fast drive for storage. You'll also probably want some external backup/storage - a big portable drive is usually good for graphic designers. You could consider the various RAID setups too. As much RAM as you can afford as well - although the missus surprisingly has never had issues with 4GB.

Thanks for the replay, will probably just get i5 then with ssd + fast storage drive and 16GB ram

 

[Gerpur]

Thanks for all the help, he ended up getting i7 3770, 16GB ram, 120GB ssd with 2TB as storage and HD 7770 GPU and already had 2x 24" monitors.