Graphic Animation/Delineate Workloads?

Basically I am looking to build my own system. My budget is around 5000$. I was thinking to myself what would be the best way to maximize efficiency and power from the machines. I am looking to work in 3d animation in programs such as Maya, 3d Max, AE, and all the plugins that comes with adobe. I dont know whether to create one massive machine (by massive I mean comparable to my budget) or whether to create two machines and use one for hard core processing tasks such as rendering. One would be to render and the other would be to edit and work on the heavy programs.

Editing bay/Graph Mo Computer Specs
Two quads or a single 6-core Intel
Nvidia Quadro 4000 Graphics Card
16Gb RAM
and everything else that a computer needs (ie Im too lazy to write it out).

Render Bay ie Second Computer
Two 16-core AMD server Opteron Processors
32GB RAM

3 Questions
1. Is this the only thing that the render bay really needs, (ie I could install a cookie cutter graphics card and motherboard)
2. Has anyone ever tried this method. Is the workflow easy, delineating from one computer to the other.
3. Is it even worth it?

ANY suggestions would really be appreciated.

Thanks in advance and thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it.

Thank Gd for this website!