Need opinions on a new system...

Hey all,

I'm gonna be helping throw together a system for a friend and I would really appreciate some input on it. He's going to be working with programs like 3D Studio Max and possibly Maya. Things of that nature.
Which do you think would benefit him more?

Dual channel DDR system with 1 gig of Ram and a 2.53ghz P4.

or

Dual XP1700 T Bred b's with 1 gig of Ram?

This system will not be OC'd, so that isn't an option. Any comments or suggestions on the board chip and RAM?

Also, what about a vid card? This system won't be for gaming really, he may play a little Q3 her an there, but it isn't really all that important. What about a Radeon 9000?

Could also use some suggestions on hard drive setups. Regular IDE with 8mb cache? SATA? SCSI would be nice, but we are probably gonna be on a budget of somekind. Thought about an IDE Raid setup, but i think it might be too ustable. He live in another state which makes tech support a bit tough.

Any suugestion you all might have would rock. Do me a favor and tell me why you suggest what you suggest too. Also, remember, no OC'ing and will probably be on a budget under $1000...as far under as we can be to save the guy some cash.

Thanks

I would deff. go with the dual settup. I hear 3d rendering and the like is so much faster with dualies. Also, for a vid card... The 9000 should be enough. More than enough I think for that. For harddrives, I think some nice 80 gig with 8 meg chache in some kinda RAID settup should do nicely. You could always do a raid 0+1 (or is it 1+0 )

Actually I heard the opposite. I think they had a comparison in last month's Maximum PC. I'd go with an Athlon w/ dual DDR instead though, cause AMD tends to perform a little bit better on those kind of applications. Go with an ASUS A7N8X deluxe, an Athlon 2400+, dual sticks of value corsair DDR333 RAM, and 2x 80 GB western digital HDDs in a striped RAID array. Oh yeah...I think the Radeon 9000 is a good choice too.

Wouldn't a P4 DC DDR setup make more sense though? I thought the bandwith gains on an AMD DC DDR system were minimal in comparison.

duals fo sure. Those CPUs ar eboth high in speed, and when rendering, the duals would be better, so, um, ya.

More opinions?