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Looks good to me, Tyler. I put together a fairly similar system back in July, and I've been more than happy with it. One thing that upped the price of my system a bit was that I concentrated on making it silent (or as silent as reasonably possible). I've been thrilled with that, as it is far below the ambient noise of the room (another system), except those times when the fans kick up to a higher rpm due to some video encoding going on.

My specs:
i7 920 2.66GHz 1366
ProlimaTech Megahalems cooler
Asus P6T Deluxe V2 LGA 1366
OCZ Platinum 6GB (x2) DDR3 1600
HIS Radeon HD 4670 1GB 128-bit DDR3
Antec P183 case & CP-850 PSU
Hard drives are mostly 7200.12 1TB Seagates (cool, quiet, and fast)

If gaming isn't important (and I assume it isn't, since it isn't on your list), I'd think a Radeon 5670 is as high as you'd want to go. If you want something passively cooled, I think you have to drop down to a 5450. I don't believe the difference between the two cards would be at all visible in Photoshop, Premiere, or AE. But one thing with the 5450 is that it may or may not be capable of vector adaptive deinterlacing (the last I read of it, the verdict was still not clear). It isn't a big deal for me, and I'd probably go with the 5450 if I were building a new system today. But YMMV.

Bet you'll love this system!

Two thoughts:

- Why so much memory?  Are you running a 64-bit O/S?  You are probably already aware of this, but just in case you aren't - a 32-bit O/S is only capable of using up to 4 GB RAM.  And while a 64-bit O/S can use more, the app also has to be designed to use more memory as well.  What apps are you thinking will use so much memory?

- Why a quad core?  Once again, an app would need to be designed to use multiple cores in order to take advantage.  Most apps do not take advantage of multiple cores.  What apps are you thinking will use the multiple cores?

Also, if you are interested in using a multi-core - Intel is supposed to launch a new line of 6-core and 8-core CPUs later this month.  So you might want to wait for the announcement.  The announcement might also bring prices on other CPUs down somewhat.

And AMD is coming out with 12-core CPUs as well.

You probably already know this, but just in case...

If you plan on installing a 64 bit O/S, then you will also need to install 64-bit applications as well (otherwise you won't see much difference at all).  If you run 32-bit apps on a 64-bit O/S, the apps will continue to only see 2 GB of RAM (the limit for 32-bit apps).

Adobe Photoshop CS4 does provide a 64-bit version of their app, but it seems that many plugins don't have 64-bit support yet.  I'm not sure of the other Adobe apps.

You can read some more info on Adobe Photoshop CS4 and 64-bit here:

http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/photoshop-cs4-64bit-32bit.html

Also, you want to make sure that you get 64-bit versions of all of your drivers.

Finally, there is no upgrade path from 32-bit to 64-bit, you will need to do a complete reinstall of the O/S and all of your apps.

Hope that helps...

the adobe apps will suck out all the memory and cores they can but as mentioned a number of plugins dont have 64bit versions. Still gives the advantage that 32bit pshop can be told to use say 90% of available memory and there is plenty of memory left for other apps.

the 15k sas drive requires a sas controller, if you're not going all sas drives I'd wouldnt bother and drop in another 10k raptor.

video - http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_quadro_cx_us.html is designed for adobe apps, pity the $2000 rrp
personally I'm keen on the quadro / firepro cards but they are expensive

thanks for the heads up.  I just saw that on another place too - I guess I will just be running 10k drives or SSD's

yes video cards are a killer. toms hardware has all the charts but for gaming and doesnt include the workstation cards

re hard drives.  people now seem to raving about the intel x-25 ssd, apparently much faster than any platter drive (but I'm not really up on it all anymore, but may be worth looking into)

Hope this helps 

Apple's Get a Mac - Broken Promises

Avoid QUADRO, go for a normal GPU, NVIDIA or AMD doesn't really matter. CUDA drivers are available for any NVIDIA GPU, AMD has support for OpenCL which is going to be standard for general purpose computing on GPUs. You don't need 1GB on the Graphics Card, 512mb is ok.

Ram: lots, as much as you can, if you save on the GPU go for more ram (12mb or 16mb). The biggest bottleneck for a PC is the available ram.

I'd say disk speed is ever more critical than ram. I don't remember when was the last time I used all of my 12GB ram. Check this comparison of SSD and a (fast) normal drive:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Jz7IMwBt4" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Jz7IMwBt4</a>

Scratch disk = SSD. You only need a scratch disk if you don't have enough ram, but I think that with 8 gigs that isn't a problem (I worked on 30k*20k res files with multiple layers and never ran out of RAM). You can check this if you use PS for a while and then check the efficiency in the status bar or just open the task manager to see how much ram you use. Not sure which version of PS you have, but 32 bit PS can only use 2 gigs of ram, well 3 gigs with the workaround I think. Not sure if you have any plugins that don't work with 64 bit PS.

You constantly access drives - every time you open/save an image. Also when developing raw images, batch processing a folder of images the speed difference is quite big.

And for graphics card: I'd also say cheap. I bought Nvidia Geforce 9600GT. For now not enough programs are able to use the power of the GPU (PS only has some fancy scrolling and stuff like that, in AE it helps previewing stuff but for actual calculations you still need CPU). Just check that it has all the inputs/outputs you need.

PS: I went with i7 860 because the motherboards are cheaper for 1156 socket and the speed difference is almost none.

What I wanted to say: If you're gonna use a 32 bit photoshop/windows then SSD could come in handy for a scratch drive (because you can only use 2 or 3 gigs of ram). For a 64 bit setup with 8gigs of ram, I don't see much use of it being a scratch drive (how many 7 gig files do you have on your HDD? How much ram do you have now and how big is your scratch drive?). You would benefit more if you had it for your C - system/programs drive (OS/programs start/run much faster) or if you would temporarily save your files on the drive while you edited them(faster opening/saving files).

I had a 20GB scratch disk on my system (specs above), and there were times when I brought PS CS4 to its knees because of all the disk swapping. It was pretty much unusable at those times, so I ended up reconfiguring my system to create a much larger scratch disk.

The optimum size of the scratch disk depends on the size and number of files you open, and (most importantly) how many levels of undo you have configured. I like a lot of levels of undo.