The single and best upgrade you can make is quality ram - particularly where photo editing is concerned - this followed by a sata 2 disk (if Mobo supports it) with high burst speeds will make the largest differences. AMD and Intel are now with awesome chips but intel is known for its longer pipelines and that is why they hold the edge over AMD for video processing and also a slight boost with pics. this is also the reason why AMD have the edge over intel when gaming is concerned. Upgrade the ram but not with corsair value - spend the extra few quid and get quality ram and you will notice the difference - it will also allow you to overclock the system gaining yet more performance. Corsair TwinX is awesome and I highly reccommend it but it is dual channel and im not sure your system supports that but it would still make a significant increase to performance working without dual channel support. The RAM would speed it all up but not reduce the workload of the CPU so consider a dual core CPU especially as prices are now driopping considerably thanks to teh launch of INTELS excellent new Core Duo X6800. Of course this would also mean a new motherboard so basically upgrade everything lol - welcome to the frustrating world of performance hardware.
