Hello guys,

I'm building an office PC and so I am looking to get some advice on which direction to go in.

- I will be using/doing:
Accounting program, document handeling, much Excel usage, playing music, basic 2D work (Photoshop, Xara Extreme), eventually I will do some occasional video editing work (Vegas, Premiere)

- Thing to consider:
I have a bad? habit of having many programs running at once.
Total PC budget is ~$800-900 (adjustable) excluding monitors.
Regarding costs I can only say that I want something that is suitable for my needs, the cheaper the better of course but if cheaper means less stability or performance I prefer something more expensive.

- I have identified three alternative solutions;
a) ~i5/i7, using the integrated graphics.
b) i3, 3220T or similar together with a graphics card, thinking of a HD6870, HD7700, GTX 550Ti, or a GTX 650.
c) AMD solution: FX-4170, A8-3870K, or perhaps an A10-5800K.

- Questions:
Taking the needs into consideration, which would be the best alternative considering performance and noise level?
Is there a better solution that I have not considered?
More specifically, which processer model (and graphics card if needed) should I go for?

Here's the good news - your most demanding apps (Photoshop, Premiere, Vegas) now use Open CL and Open GL for acceleration, it doesn't take a lot of horsepower to make use of it, so you won't need a discrete GPU. They will run faster with four CPU cores than two and can also make use of hyperthreading. The other apps take very little CPU horsepower to run.

So, here's a build:
a dual core + iGP, like the i3-3225 ($145).
ASUS P8Z77-M ($125) or -M Pro ($140)
Fractal Arc Mini ($100), Midi ($110), or R4 ($120)
16GB of RAM. Samsung 4 x 4GB DDR3 1600 ($90)
Samsung 830 128GB or Crucial m4 128GB (look for sale prices @ $100-110).
WD Green 2TB ($110)
Seasonic G 360 Gold PSU ($60)
Scythe Mugen 3 Rev B ($50)
Win7 Home OEM ($90)
Total $870 - 905

Moving up to a quad core will improve the speed of the video tasks.

Many thanks Steve

You could save some bucks by going with 8GB now and then adding more later if you want to speed up the photo/video editing.