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Most of the times being asked this question it turns out that the one asking is heading for "measuring his private parts" rather than reconsidering his whishes and not really out to purchase any stuff. Anyways...
There is almost no way to tell what "the best" machine is at a given time, mainly because the terms of hardware change faster than one can track them. Good today means old tomorrow. Another point is that you might have one machine to do the rendering and anotherone for the designing / modelling. Some individual components differ largely in price and capabilities in dependance to the tasks you want to do: doing the cutter's work needs other hardware than rendering stills. So there are different pieces one might put on the individual "want-to-have-list". Perhaps you want more than one engine to build up your studio...
If you really want to have the best thing possible today built from "standard" PC hardware, you will need:
- Loads of money.
The "right stuff" is priced its weight in gold ;) The "major league machines" smash holes in your buget measured beyond US$ 5K by a tick of the tail...
- Loads of CPU-power.
The more, the better. Multi-CPU-Engines are a good choice, since Max can do multithreaded tasks. Right now - with MaxV3's PIII optimizing - it seems to be a good choice to get hands on Intel's PIIIs, but there are cons to this CPU, such as the ID-problem (refer to Slashdot and others). Perhaps the AMD Athlon is a thing to be considered. It is blindingly fast. Have a look at the speed of the frontside and the backside bus and get hands on enough first- and secondlevel cache.
- Loads of RAM.
The more, the better. Get PC100 SD-RAMs or faster ones. Head for 512MB and more per CPU. Perhaps Rambus becomes an option in the future.
- Ultra-II-Wide SCSI discs (or how this thing might be called).
Really fast Discs. Top choice in data storage. Take one HDD for each of the following: OS and the programms, swapping, data. You will want to have fast discs to decrease HDD-accesstime as much as possible. Choose fast (7200RPM+) and big (5GB+) ones. Consider the space as a rule of thumb like this for intense working (Caution here! Given values might be easily exceeded!):
- 1GB for the OS,
- 1GB for a backup OS (in case the main OS crashes unrecoverable),
- 3 times MB of total RAM + 10% for swapping,
- 4GB for software,
- 4GB for saving stills,
- 8GB for saving anims,
- 4GB for mapfiles (texture images),
- 1GB for material libaries.
Have an eye on the disc's data-transfer rate (higher = better), weighted accesstimes, random seek and thelike (lower times = higher performance). Remember that these discs are usually suprisingly capable radiators so get fans to cool them...
- OpenGL capable Graphics Adapter with loads of RAM.
OpenGL is - as far as I understood it - the thing to have if you are doing professional 3D. Have a look at the polygon-rate, texture-RAM and such things. Although not really supported by NT choosing an AGP-card might be the best choice, since the AGP is an individual port besides PCI.
- Motherboard able to cope with that stuff.
Look at how many RAM-slots it has, how much RAM (total MB) it supports, what CPU-speeds you can set, how many CPUs of what type it can hold, if there is a SCSI-interface onboard, what bus-speeds it offers, how many PCI-slots it has...
Ah, yes, and you will want to have a backup-device, a large screen, NT, a servertower with redundant powersupplies, a failsafe and battery-buffered powersource, a flatbed scanner, a 3D scanner, 3D glasses, a dataglove, a graphics tablet, a videoprinter...
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