3d hardware advice

[Havok]

Hi guys,
im planning on building a new pc very soon and need some advice on what features and specs i should be considering... so that i can get the best out of apps like 3d max.
My budget is ~£1000 on hardware alone - not including monitor.

your help would be much appreciated,
cheers
chris. :P

[DarkTrancer]

do a search of the forums for gfx cards and building a pc,there has been loads of discussion on this all of it still relevant

[ArbitraryDesign]

Here's what I just built for myself, and so far I have been very happy with it:

Antec Mini-Tower case with 350 watt power supply.
Gigabyte K7 Triton 7NNXP motherboard.
Athlon 2800 processor.
ATI Fire-GL Z1 graphics card.
120 GB Western Digital Hard Drive.
2@ 512MB Western Digital RAM
Pioneer DVD writer.
Generic 3.5 floppy drive (probably didn't need it)
Microsoft wireless multimedia keyboard / mouse.
Windows XP Pro.

I bought all of the parts from http://www.newegg.com and I found their prices to be the best (even better than pricewatch.com on some items). Everything arrived quickly and in good condition, whereas I have heard of bogus vendors at Pricewatch.com who do bait-and-switch.

Everything I got from Newegg cost under $1,200. In addition I bought a used 21" Dell Trinitron monitor locally, and a used 12"x12" Wacom tablet from eBay.
The entire setup cost about $1,600... and I have been very happy with it.

I bought most of this stuff about 4 months ago, and some things have changed since then...

If I were building my system today, I'd probably go with the Athlon 64 processor, instead of the 2800... even though I am very happy with the 2800. This would also mean choosing a different motherboard to accomodate the newer processor.
Also, I plan to add another 1GB of RAM in the future, so if you have money left over, get more RAM... and maybe a bigger hard drive too.
Amazing how quickly 120 GB can fill up!

Just my 2 cents worth. I hope it helps.