Best ~$400 route for Premiere and 3DS?

[kcarring]

I've read a lot of great articles here, on TH and I've read that, for instance a Fermi based 480 card isn't a good route for encoding and rendering. I want to build up a machine based around AMD 6 or 8 cores, Asus motherboard with 2 pcie2 graphics slots, and room for RAM, and run Win 7 Pro 64bit.

My question: I currently own and am not happy with a X2 Dual Core w/9800GT 1Gig. Encoding and Rendering are way too slow. In the $400 range i see the:

NVIDIA QUADRO FX1800 PCIEX16 - VCQFX1800-PCIE-PB ~$400

Is this a pro card? What are it's rivals in that price range, beyond, say buying a 480 (gaming card).

A step up, I'm looking seriously at, would be:

Quadro 4000 PCIE X16 - VCQ4000-PB

I'm open to suggestion of spending $800 on a card if i could truly understand the absolute benefit.

It's confusing... I know i don't want to spend $1500 let alone $4000 on a video card, but I want to see significant advantage over my X2 Athlon 6000 + GT9800 1 gig setup. currently to render a high quality 3 min video on 720p takes WAY to long. what takes me now, 1 hr, I'd like to see step down to 7 minutes. Worse, in 3DS - I can only scanline, using (and buying!) VRAY was a waste with my current system.

I will of course upgrade to AMD 6 core, or i7.

Thanks for some basic steering!

 

[wa1]

If you're not gaming at all then go with that Quadro FX1800, that's a good card for rendering works.
But if you are going to do some gaming then get a gaming card like GTX470, that's should good enough to handle rendering and great for gaming too...
Just make sure you have enough power on PSU.