What's a decent hardware config for photo/video editing ?

I apologize if this has been asked a million times before, but I'm a newcomer. I'm seriously thinking of making the switch from the dark side and buying my first Mac - the iMac 20". My main priorities will be photo editing of both jPEG and RAW images from my Nikon D50 and ( at last ) editing all those video tapes I made of the kids and family vacations over the last 15 years. I'm not a professional photographer or videographer, but I don't want my next machine to be underpowered and cause me to get frustrated while waiting for it to do the the work and therefore loose interest. I'm kind of a hardware geek, so my philosophy is slanted towards more is better - more disk space, more RAM, yada yada yada. From what I've read on forums and at dpreview website, a lot of people recommend more system RAM, so I'm condfident 2 GB of system RAM is a good place to start. However, I haven't seen much talk about 128 vs 256 MB of RAM on the video cards. That's a no brainer for gaming -my son has a PC with 256 MB on a Gforce 7600 and he's happy with the performance, at least until the next generation of games comes out. However,I don't want to confuse the needs of gaming with that of video/photo editing.
Is there a benefit to upgrading the graphics card to 256 MB ? In the near future, I would like to buy additional software, like Aperture, Nikon's Capture NX, or Final Cut.
I realize that upgrading the video memory by the user is not easy on the iMac, so any hardware items that I would like to upgrade should be done at time of ordering from Apple through the Apple Store.
Thanks much, and looking forwarding to a new Mac soon.
Bill

If you plan to use final cut I would strongly suggest the graphics card upgrade to 256. 2 gigs of ram will be good. This varies from person to person but the processor upgrade could be usefull but it does cost a lot.

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