Power PC for Virtual Machines

[n30_mkii]

Hi all, i'm a little out of touch with new hardware, but I'm just after some advice for a power machine, that will be used for some gaming but mostly for photo editing / photoshop, and especially vmware i.e multiple demanding virtual machines.

So I require high end processing power, lots of ram, etc

I'm just wanting clarification that the Intel I7 is the way to go?

I can then team that with potentially 12gb of memory, and a couple of SSD's where needed, graphics wise any card these days should be capable of what I want.

Is there a better more cost effective route to go down? Slightly older tech but more ram etc?

Any advice appreciated

 

[bJN]

The older-tech alternative would be to use either an Intel Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom II X4 setup, but both of these would be beaten by any i7 and possibily even the higher end i5's for the sort of tasks you need.