If you want my advice on this it all comes down to how much you want to spend. As you asked above what budget this will set up for, it will depend on how powerful and how long you want it to last. Personally if your doing professional work in CS5 Photoshop, you do not need (as others stated above) much in terms of a GPU so you can save money on that and instead focus on the core of the computer.
About the CPU, is the 4460 a better CPU than the 4440 for his build?
Is it better to have 4x4gb sticks or 2x8gb sticks?
He just mentionned he needs a monitor on the avg budget side. Any recommendations for a decent priced monitor?
He said he wanted min. 22inch for his monitor
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My recommendation is this, these are two builds at different budgets that can fit your needs:
i7 4930k
Asrock X79 Extreme4
Gskill Ripjaws Z 1866 4x4gb
Termaltake 550Watt Gold PSU
Samsung 840 EVO 500gb
Seagate 1tb 7200RPM drive
R7 250 (just for monitor output mostly, just picked a cheap one but could go lower than that)
Hyper212 CPU Cooler
Roughly 60 dollars for a case of your choice (I can recommend, but it may come down to price or what you like)
100 bucks for Windows if you do not have a copy (8 or 7, though as stated above I agree go for 7 in this case)
That would be an extreme build coming in around 1600 dollars depending on the case Might be a bit overkill but since you stated you wanted to see what the budget could do I thought I would show you a more extreme approach. I consider it a little overkill unless you really want the most power possible.
Here is a much more reasonable build:
i7 4790
Gigabyte GA z97m
Corsair Vengeance Pro 16gb 2x8gb 1866
Termaltake 550Watt Gold PSU
60 bucks for case
Now as for HDD/SSD's my opinion is that for professional editing it is better to stick with high quality or high grade SSDs/HDDs. I personally if I was doing this would go for the following
WD Velociraptor 1tb 10k RPM
They are great for photo editing, video editing, and other things that are normally strenuous on systems while giving a better price to gb ratio.
That build would come to around 900 with an OS included.
oh I'm not very familiar with IPS monitors. how good are they?
what benefits do they bring?
are they any good for gaming or only for graphics editing?
As far as monitors go, IPS monitors will be better for the photo editor. The quality and colors look better and will give a better picture for people working with colors. Normally for photo editing I would say to stay away from a TN panel as the benefits it brings would be of no use to a photo editor and its downsides would actually harm the experience for him.
With monitors though, it again comes down to price. If you want something very expensive, you can try this:
Samsung SyncMaster
or for a bit less
Dell U2713H
