3d rendering and animation new build

What's your budget? Do you have monitors? Is this pro or a hobby?

working towards pro. I would like to build for about 1500 to 2000. I have monitors, a firegl v7700 graphics and a western digital 10000 rpm hd.

Eh, a Xeon would be hard to fit into this budget, but if rendertime isn't all that important an i7-950 or AMD 1055t could work. Are your programs primarily GPU limited or primarily CPU limited (more rendering or modelling)?

How much ram do you use? How much do you think it's possible you'll use? Do you need ALL of the components besides the raptor/potentially the GPU?

i had rather stay with an amd 1090T? I will run a min of 8 gig of ram. What do you think of the 1090T and asus crosshair IV? What size power supply whould I need. I will upgrade next year if the project we are working on takes off.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/100?vs=146

And the 950 is ~10$ cheaper.

AMD only makes sense if you're looking for a price/performance build. A 1055t can be had for 178$ and has ~85% of the 1090T's performance.

PSU: You would probably be fine with just a good 650 watt, but there's a good deal on the XFX black edition 750 watt units right now. Since this is a render build, it will likely be maxed a lot so the efficiency of the XFX might make sense.

asusu crosshair IV motherboard?

It's a good mobo, no doubts, but it's expensive for what it is. You'll get 99% of the performance out of pretty much any other 800 series mobo now that the IMC is integrated on the CPU. If you're going for mega-overclocking or something then it would probably be worth more, but seeing as this is a semipro build I doubt that.

(I still think the 1090T is the wrong way to be taking things -- either get great price/performance from the 1055t or get a bit better for less performance with the i7-950. Heck, a Xeon 5620 isn't out of the question either).

what motherboard would you suggest with th t1055?

Non gamer or no need CF/SLI why pay the premium? So i would pick

a. 880G if u like the idea of IGP back up...or even option of Surround View/multi display when used together with a Radeon class GPU

b. 870 chipset

what is IGP backup?

In case your main GPU ever has issues, or if you want to drive an additional screen just for desktop use, or if you ever retire this system for use as a server, the motherboard has a built in, lowend graphics card.