We are planning to purchase around 25 computers for a computer lab for working with CS4 Production Premium at the high school level. Mainly Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop. Our budget is, unfortunately, a mere $550-$625 per machine (just the tower though, we have monitors). I've already established that a 64-bit operating system makes a significant difference in the performance, even though Photoshop is the only 64-bit application, and I'm now hung up on whether or not it's worth the cost of a quad-core processor over a dual-core.
I'm discovering the different hardware needs for each application, so I'm trying to find an economic balance that will give me the best performance per buck. It seems that Premiere benefits significantly from more cores (we're editing 1440x1080 AVCHD), and this article over at Tom's Hardware has convinced me that I don't want to compromise with a hyperthreaded dual-core for After Effects.
I'm also struggling with what part the graphics card plays in the mix. Which applications lean on the graphics card, and will it make much difference as long as I meet the requirements (OpenGL 2.0, Shader Model 3.0, Direct3D 10, and 256 Mb Ram)?
I understand I will need to settle for less-than-awesome with my budget, but I'm already making sacrifices to get the number to $625. I would like to make sure that those sacrifices will be worth it for a quad-core system.