Photo editing PC priorities?

[matthew_h]

My PC's motherboard has failed and I am looking to replace it but I am stuck as to the best course of action. I only have a small budget (circa £200) so can't go mad.

What is the priority? Processor? RAM? Graphics card?

At the moment I'm looking at something like an Athlon 64 3700 processor with a gig of RAM and using my current 128mb graphics card but wonder if I might be better off with my priorities in a different order.

Can anyone advise?

[gregorio!]

depends what you want to do, if you play games, then the graphics card is the most important. If you use it to edit pictures with pshop then ram is probably most useful. If you use it to videoedit and render to dvd, then cpu and ram are important.
HTH

[matthew_h]

I won't use it for games at all so no worries there.

Main use by far would be Post Processing with possibly some minor video editing

[gregorio!]

I'd keep that existing graphics card, it should be fine. Can you stretch to 2gb of ram with that chip? If not 1gb is will still work well.

[matthew_h]

I could probably manage to get an extra gig with that set up.

You think it would be worthwhile?

[Rednut05]

You talk about keeping the same Graphics card. If you buy a new motherboard, don't forget to buy it to suit your graphics card, AGP or PCI-Express.

AGP is the dying technology so you may want to consider a cheap PCI-Express card if you are not running one currently.

As said above, look to get 1 Gig RAM, 2 would be great.

The processor is quite good for a cheap price. Socket 939.