Ave,

I was looking for advice/suggestions for building a brand new workstation dedicated for Maya. The systems main & somewhat only usage is going to be CGI development. Primary development will be Maya with a host of plugins like Maxwell, RealFlow etc. Secondary applications will be Adobe CS5, Audio/Video Editing using Sony Vegas/Sound Forge.

There will be no gaming or as such other uses for the workstation.

I'm looking at a budget of around $2,000 for the workstation; I can go slightly over if justified. Rendering is where my current systems (which in no way were built for Maya rendering) are lagging behind - and I need to improve that drastically.

From what I understand (And please correct me if I'm wrong), CPU is the most important component for Rendering; GPU is more pertinent for the viewport (Unless you use a GPU Renderer like Arion, which I don't!).

Doing a little bit of research & looking around, I've made a preliminary list .. but I'm still looking for knowledge & recommendation. I might be quite off - this is all gathered from base knowledge.

This is what I had in mind:

ASUS Z8NA-D6C Dual LGA 1366 Motherboard
2 * Intel Xeon E5645 Westmere-EP 2.4Ghz 6-Core CPU
PNY VCQ2000-PB Quadro 2000 1GB GDDR5 GPU
G.Skill Ripjaws 24GB (6 X 4GB) DDR3 1333

Not 100% sure about PSU required to run all this.

With PSU, Case & BDR, I'm hitting around $2100 which is definitely doable.

I'm open to all suggestions; recommendations for this build. I must point out that I'm not very familiar with either Server CPU's & Motherboards or Workstation Graphics. I've only ever built desktops! Never a workstation. So this new territory for me.

Thanks.