CS6 and RAM (Win7 64bit)

Question

Am getting ready to get my next computer started this coming week and now trying to see if 16 Gb RAM is sufficient.. in other words is 32 Gb RAM worth an extra $120 in terms of performance. Will be using Intel 3770K CPU. Major usage for Pshop is digital images. Presently working with 18MP files and anticipate by summer's end to be working with 100-180Mb Tif files.
GPU.. am planning on using built in HD4000 Intel graphics, at least at first. Thx in advance!

Answer 1

Thx Trevor,
Is always interesting when "things" change. Currently am still an XP holdout and now that Win 8 is on the near horizon I'm transitioning to Win7 64. Once I was an early adopter and "enjoyed" the growing pains but as I've aged and dealing with longer work hours, and other issues, my desire for the bleeding edge has gone away.. stability is a key for me!
To say 16Gb "should" be enough just sounds funny! But doubling RAM right now will add about $120 to the cost of my build which is already nearing the $2K mark, and I just cannot find any real evidence the extra 16 Gb is going to make CS6 run visibly better. I was going to us the built in HD4000 GPU of the 3770K CPU but am now getting information that CS6 may well benefit from a dedicated graphics card. In past CS seemed to make little use of GPU.
Is odd that Pshop would still use a sratch disk with that much RAM but am curious then about using RAM to set up a RAM disk ala the old days in Win 3.1 when RAM disks were essential for speed. If I bought the extra RAM I was going to pursue setting up a RAM disk and use it for the scratch disk. if possible that would certainly speed things up.
I am also going down path of an SSD for my boot disk but (and have not yet researched it yet) saw the Seagate "hybrid" drives that might work well for a scratch disk.. the 750 Gb hybrids are about $140 at this time and without question would be fast, as long as theya rent limited by number of writes like SSD's are.
So that is my balance point... 16 Gb versus 32 Gb and to have a dedicated GPU or use HD4000 for CS6. I have an ATI V4900 in current machine I could reuse but its OpenGl support in XP has bene dismal and so am considerng the Quadro 600 nvidia card in hopes the drivers are better, if I go dedicated GPU route. Right now it I am leaning toward 16 Gb and Nvidia GPU but will again sleep on it!