I'm about to buy a new desktop for the home study that will be used as a general PC for mum to do the odd word document, send emails, my son to play his various ultra violeent online games and I'd also like it to be the main PC I use for lightroom and photoshop edits.

I'm looking at getting a i5 with 8gb ram and 1GB graphics card ?

Is this grunty enough do you think ? It's only about $1200, to go to an i7 is up another $500 or so from what I can see