Building a system that will best utilize 3ds Max 8...

Yeah your spec seems good and should easily do what you need it to do. although i see no mention of a PSU>? I would go for a Tagan or Seasonic but make it 500-600w and make sure it will work with your mobo  

Your system is very simialr to my current one and it works very well.

I first started using Max on off around R2. Back then my top of the range rig was a PII 266Mhz with 64MB.

For Rendering images or animations you'll always need plenty of CPU power and RAM. I don't think that requirement has ever changed!

For workspace use you used to need a good OpenGL card, but these days (and correct me if I'm wrong!) you should be able to get away with Setting Max up to use DirectX and therefore any good gaming card.

If your doing animations as part of your course then I would suggest a bigger or another hard drive.

Again, if you do animation or you have a large number of textures / complex models in your scenes 4 Gb will be better than 2 Gb. The speed of the RAM will not be very important if you run out and have to start paging to disk!

Other than that dual core is good. Multi-cpu works well when rendering.

Hope it goes well and you get that job with Pixar!!

Simon

I work in Maya mostly and Max rarely but the requirements are broadly similar. The spec looks ok. As you said I'd wait and see what prices are available when the new Intel chip is launched as its likely dual core AMDs (on 939 and AMD2) will come down in price. Its also worth considering some Conroe reviews for comparison as there might be a better bang for buck with that when real world benchies start coming out. 939's are already coming down in price, expect another thump when Conroe actually ships in bulk.

I'd definitely look at a bigger HDD as mentioned already, a larger one for storage at the very least; animations really do take up space.

If you want to spend more money and go for a dedicated rig then dual dual Opterons are curerntly the best bet (but then you are talking spending about 3 times what your current spec is). If you don't want to game (and you have the money) then you could also contemplate a Quadro card as they more neatly meet the heavy requirements of 3d apps.

Having said that, if you have access to college machines and some manner of render farm for your term/year projects you don't need a home system that beats the workstation path really so you can rest easy on the spec ideas you have. I run one pro level system at home (and then only because I had a contract and got the gear that way, had I had the job I am in now back then I would not have bothered), the others are regular PC's that just provide additional more regular fun.

You might want to consider dual monitor support as a factor when choosing a graphics card whichever one you go for; it can be useful to have viewports across more than one monitor if you are doing a lot of detail work. We will usually have bespoke software running on one screen whilst Maya runs on another 1/2. Otherwise I'd go for the absolute biggest monitor you can get as the bigger area you can have toolbars and viewports in the better. The more you work on customising your in prog view the more space you will enjoy being able to make use of.

If you are going for max memory its worth thinking about a 64bit O/S but this, at present, might compromise what other programmes you can run. Certainly a beefy dual core and memory are key factors in working complex scenes, rendering and animating (by whatever means you choose). More is merrier when it comes to 3D.

If I might also recommend another forum you might want to check out

http://forums.cgsociety.org/

Lots of pros hanging out over there and actually eventually a good way to find work (whether with Pixar or elsewhere).  

Excellent, thanks for the loads of advice guys. I'm glad that it appears my system will do what I want it to do. I forgot to mention that I already have a 250 gb external, so that's why I'm going for such a small-capacity HDD. I just want the speed of a Raptor drive..... A render farm is also available at school, as I also forgot to mention. I would really enjoy having dual monitors, and I'll definitely jump on that idea if it turns out that I have a little extra money to burn. Weeble, I'll definitely take a gander at CG Society! I've already got a deviantArt account (although it's been inactive since I've been focusing on animations for the past few months), but looking at the competition is always great for keeping one on his toes.  

Thanks again!