Pookeyhead is spot on, as usual. Though I am wondering why a 3GHz i7 is struggling with shots from a new camera, what the heck did you buy?
I've never made any direct comparisons in Photoshop, but other maths intensive benchmarks would suggest it wouldn't perform very favourably against SB-E, and I would suspect it would be FPU performance, and RAM bandwidth that would be it's Achilles heel. Good point.
Pookey speaketh the truth. I've not had much trouble with 16GB of RAM, and that is despite some of my larger Photoshop documents topping 1GB in file size (although I'm sure more ram would help here). RAM is so cheap at the moment, it's worth going for 32GB if viable, but it's not worth forcing things in order to do so. It's almost guaranteed that more RAM will be required in the future though, so if you can only afford 16GB at present try to do so in a way that adding another 16GB in the future is possible, i.e. buy 2x8Gb sticks over 4x4GB sticks is possible. I've been happy with my HP ZR24w monitors, but they can not be hardware calibrated. I can live with this because the work I do is not colour essential. That's up to you to make the decision if spending the extra is worth it for you, but remember that a monitor can last many, many years if it's of a high quality, whereas the rest of the system will probably be upgraded several times over. It is possible to software calibrate monitors which don't support hardware calibration, but the quality isn't as good, I'm sure others know much more about this than I do though. Out of interest Pooky, what's your take on the benefits of a tablet? I suppose it depends what kind of work you do, but I find it really speeds up my workflow, and can be a much more comfortable way to work. I only have my brothers old graphire4, but trying out my brothers Cintiq is a lovely experience. I've found that my tablet saves me more time than upgrating my hardware does.
My scanner pumps out larger files than that does and my old X3 720 handled them fine. An i7 (of any generation) shouldn't be having significant performance issues, though I guess it depends what is actually being done with the shots... if you're stitching 12 of them together you'd run into issues ^^
