Lightroom 4/Photoshop CS6 Hardware Considerations

I'm going to be building a kick *** processing machine for lightroom 4/Photoshop CS6 on Windows 7. 
I'd like to know the optimum processing cores for CPU and optimum video cards.  Is there a spec that I can find that will tell me how lightroom 4 and photoshop CS6 use CPU processing cores, ram and video cards.
What can you tell me?

You will find more material regarding hardware on the Photoshop Forum.
Others will probably make recommendations for CPU. I have a quad Xeon and am happy with it - although it's not the latest Xeon.
RAM: With 12 GB you will be fine - unless you regularly work on huge image files  in Photoshop. I have 12 GB and Lr rarely goes up to 10 GB.
I would recommend that you do some research for "workstations". Workstation computers are workhorses from the ground up including all hardware components. It's no use to have a fast processor and lots of RAM when the other hardware components can't keep up with speed or data throughput. Also workstation computers are built with expansion in mind - more RAM, slots for additional cards, etc.
Hard drives: Get a system with 3 internal drives; they don't need to be huge - 500 GB is fine. Get an SSD for your OS, Photoshop, and Lr.
If money is not an issue get all hard drives as SSDs. But don't skimp - a 40 GB SSD does you no good - it's way too small.
With today's RAM and CPU's it's the hard drives that are becoming the bottle neck. As you know conventional hard drives have spinning disks and the reading/writing takes time.
Lr is constantly reading / writing to the catalog; it also uses the Lr cache. If you have only one hard drive the read- and write cycles for Lr can pile up and your fine and expensive CPU sits idle waiting until the reading / writing is done. Keep in mind that your system also reads and writes to hard drive at the same time.
Therefore I use 3 internal drives: Drive C for OS, Photoshop, LR; drive D for Photoshop scratch disk, Lr cache, OS paging file; drive E for Lr catalog.
You probably want to use external hard drives. I recommend eSata drives: they are fast and reliable. So on your system you need at least one eSata outlet port - better two. If two are not available you can buy an eSata card (costs about $ 50) which gives you 2 outlets.
Video Card: don't get taken in by gaming cards. They're not what you want for Lr and Photoshop. Get a workstation class card that is designed to run 24/7.
Monitor: get the best and largest you can afford. Get a monitor specifically for photographers. And don't forget you monitor calibration; you need the hardware (spectrometer) and the software. Some monitors (Eizo, LaCie, Nec) come with hardware calibration.

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