Hi.. It's not my area of expertise but I just had a friend over who does work with digital photograpy professionaly and he suggests to start off with at least five times as much ram as the average size of photos you'll be manipulating with photoshop... So if it's dealing with a 25meg file it should have exlusive access to 250megs of ram (keeping in mind the operating system should have at least 256M as well)

His computers at work all have an absolute min of 512megs and most have double or triple that. None have a processor less than 1.2G and he finds that 1.5G is a decent starting point.

He also said that they've recently bought a couple of Western Digital Hardrives with 8megs of buffer memory (as opposed to the 2meg buffers he had been using) and there's a noticeable difference there too.

They all use either win2k or xp pro.

The price range of $2k-2.5k would be the retail price for a high quality store bought PC but as you suggest one could be built with top notch parts for around half that.

Anyway see what others here, who may themselves use photoshop etc, say as well.