Workstation upgrade advice please

Hi, I'm in the UK and have a workstation to upgrade on a £1000 budget (give or take £200 if the extra cash spent or saved is good value)

The existing machine sports a dual socket P4 Xeon however only the case and optical drives will be retained.

The machine will solely be used to render HD film work using Adobe CS4 and After Effects. Real number crunching.

Overclocking is not desirable as this is a business machine that will be put to constant heavy use and reliability is paramout.

I'm looking to achieve the following minimum criteria:

1. High quality workstation class mainboard sporting one or two CPU sockets

2. 8 ~ 12 GB RAM with a view to cost effectively later upgrading to around 24GB

3. Quad core CPU (or two if budget allows though a 2nd can be added later)

4. 4 x Enterprise level hard drives - A system drive, a working drive and a pair of storage drives (more can be added later)

5. A good quality PSU that can also handle later upgrades.

6. A video card capable of driving a pair of 24" widescreen LCD's.


A tall order I know but I'm sure it's dobale on this limited budget. Alas, I've been out of the loop for a while and technology has moved on at an incredible pace. I'm competent in assembling the machine but I unfortunately don't have a terrible amount of time to get up to speed on the best choices.

I have a question also. Obviously throwing a lot of cores and RAM at the software will benefit however I understand it can also tap the GPU power of modern cards. Therefore would perhaps sticking with a single CPU for now and adding a powerful Video card yield good results?

Your help and advice is much appreciated, Thank you.