Hopefully purchasing this within the next 4 weeks!
AMD Opteron 165 CPU, overclocked to 2.6ghz (AMD FX60 equivalent - minus the $1500 price tag)
Asus A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
2x 1G Corsair PC3200 DDR RAM
2x Seagate 120G 7200RPM SATAII HDD 8m Cache, RAID
Pioneer DVR-110D DVDRW Black
Radeon X1600XT 256M PCI-Express VGA Card
Antec P180 Performance ATX Midi-Tower
Zalman CNPS7700CU
Fortunetec Silent Power 500W PSU
Came to around $1750 USD. I’ll probably double the RAM later in the year.
It would be great to get a few critiques from you savvy Kirupians before the cashola is laid down. The primary reason for purchasing is for 3d animation and rendering, after effects, and working with large illustrator/photoshop files.
My current setup (xp 2100+, 64meg gf440mx, 512 meg generic ram) is driving me bananas - and utterly useless for 3d in particular.
As for me being an ATI guy, nah I’m just an… err… operator :). As long as it does the job, it’s fine with me. Same with cars… I like many holdens and fords, much to a lot of peoples disgust
@Defective - yeah, ive done a bit of reading, apparently the opposite is true of Opterons… ie, they are the most robust with the most amount of headroom for overclocking. But i’ll check up on a few othere sources. I think this chip is sitting on about $500 AUD?
As for video cards, I was under the impression that the CPU was more important for intensive 3D modeling & rendering, and video cards more for games? Ill look at that 7800 though… all good advice… thanks fellas
As I said earlier, I am certainly no 3D expert, but it is my understanding that there are video cards designed for games, and then there are cards designed for 3d modeling (such as the nVidia Quadro and ATI Fire). You can certainly use one for the other, but if you want the best performance in 3d, you should look at these types of cards. (Please someone correct me if I am wrong).
Well, it can go both ways with the video cards. Really all a Fire has on a gaming card is more thoroughput, it doesn’t really have any other features that trump it. At the end of the day, they are used to make video games with. They will not usually include any rediculous shaders or anything unless new games are going to include them, which means there will be gaming card with those features shortly. Just find a happy medium and if in doubt, find somewhere to test them.
Is it a production PC or a gaming PC? I would recommend something like the others said… Maybe a Quadro?
And I went through two of the ASUS A8N-SLI motherboards because they had defective fans, so make sure you get the revision motherboard and not the one with the defective fan. I settled with the ABIT AN8-SLI which is more expensive, but well worth the money, especially with overlocking abilities. (Although I don’t know if it works with the Opteron.)
For 3D especially, it’s a interdependent issue. If you have a good CPU but a bad card, you won’t get the visual results whilst your working. If you had a good card but a bad CPU, you’ll definitely hate the slow speed. So having a good balance is what is needed.
all you need to know about processors and rednering.
rendering is a load on the processor not the video card.
the next stop is RAM.
Most boards will not support over 4 gigs of ram on a cpu - unless you go with a small entry-server motherboard using the extended-atx form factor - the one I selected from ASUS can go up to 24 gigs of ram.
the video card helps you with the user interface of the program you are using, but actual render is placed on the processor. there are some cases where render is placed on the hardware but usually you are talking some mad $$ for the right hardware and the software you are using has to support that option.
i’ve built a dual processor - each processor dual core opteron for about $3000 - combined 4 cpu cores and around 4.6 ghz factory clock speed.
Hahah… yeah pr :P. Maybe next year i’ll be able to throw something together like that ;). I imagine that is f*cking awesome to work with, to say the least.
I’m just an… err… operator :). As long as it does the job, it’s fine with me. Same with cars… I like many holdens and fords, much to a lot of peoples disgust 
