OK, more on this. I was very eager to check out burritobob's Xeon suggestion as it may have had some appeal for some of my own systems.
Firstly, the Xeon is $277 and Cinebenches at 7.03. The i7 3770K $330 and CBs at 7.91. That isn't much of a difference and breaking it down the Xeon gets you .025 CBs per dollar and the i7 0.024. The Xeon is 83% of the i7s price and 89% of its speed. For me I would choose the i7 for the speed boost.
So what about the other advantages of the Xeon, like ECC memory? Well, as soon as you shoehorn that Xeon into the consumer motherboard you lose all of that. You cant overclock the Xeon and you cant walk into your local CompUSA store and buy a replacement off the shelf. I am afraid to say that the only benefit with using the Xeon is the bragging rights of saying you have one. Yes, it is a great buy if you need a XEON chip and are putting it on a real Xeon motherboard, but that is the only time it is.
On video cards, as I mentioned, Maya and the other professional packages don't use SLI. I really wish they did/could as I would go out and buy more cards in a blink. What most system builders don't understand is the inherent difference in 3D as a gaming machine and 3D in an authoring/artist environment. The hardware can be similar but the use is different. For example a gamer will run his video card at 100% for hours on end whereas the 3D artist will run it at 100% in spurts. A 3D artist will run his CPU at 100% most times whereas a gamer will run it in spurts. So with the video card you have a difficult decision to make.
Burritobob suggests an excellent gaming setup of 2x GTX 670s with 2 GB of RAM that have a current Newegg price of $370 (I will stick to one vendor in my figures for simplicity). That gets you 4 GPUs, each with 1 GB of RAM, running in an SLI configuration - a GREAT gaming setup that would be my choice too. Adobe products don't care about SLI or even if the cards match each other – they will utilise each CUDA core they find, and with this proposal they find a LOT of them!
But, back to creating 3D and video cards and my point above of 1 GB of RAM per GPU. Unfortunately in 3D you are limited to just the RAM that is assigned to one individual GPU and unless you are doing small scenes you are going to run out very fast. 3D games are tuned and stripped down to fit into lesser amounts of RAM but when you are working in 3D then you don't have that advantage - you work with what you have and if you are creating a real-time scene you will strip it down and bake in detail after you created it. When you run out of video RAM on a big 3D scene things start running painfully slow, and if your livelihood relies on it then you are going to get frustrated. Your decision here is whether you need to spend more money, about $90 each, and get the 4GB version of the same card. If you can afford it then I would suggest just getting 2 of them for the extra $180 but if you cant then think hard about the system usage and whether your daughter's 3D work is more important than the gaming side. You could also consider, instead that the $700 that burritobob has budgeted for, one GTX 680 with 4 GB of RAM, which is a little faster and newer than the GTX 670 and only around $570.