System advice please

[grasshopper]

A question for all you hardware heads. I am try to spec a system for home so I can do my overtime in the comfort of my on house. In the office I am currenty i a old dell P4 a GX620 which also is in dire need of an upgrade, but in addition I have 5 dell core 2 duos as a mini render farm I cam DR with which works pretty well.

I have been doing some digging to work out what i need and am just going round in circles. We get good prices from dell so I'm basing my finding from them.

Firstly Intel Core2 Quad-Core QX6600 or Xeon Quad-Core 5110?

then graphic cards a geforce 8800 gt - gtx
or
a cheapish quadro - DUAL 256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 570, or pushing it FX1700?

At dell I'm basicly looking a XPS 720 or Precision T7400 my budget as about £1000 don't need a monitor but would be nice.

If anyone could give me some advise i'd appreciate it as I really haven't kept up with recent hardware development. or if anyone can suggest a good system doesn't have to be a dell it would be top.

I have read about a CPU benchmark chart but haven't been able to track an up to date one down anyone know if it's out there?

Cheers
Greg

[joconnell]

The dell XPS machines are utter crap - i've had a huge amount of problems with them so I wouldn't touch them. Go for an asus p5k motherboard, qx6600, 4 / 8 gigs of ram depending on budget and possibly look at the geforce 9 series - they're faster and cheaper than the 8 series. The quadros are a waste of money under max.

[grasshopper]

Ok jo thanks for the quick responce, Not a big fan of the Dell XPS then??!!! I'll bare that in mind. If the quadro's are aren't any good for max then what are they good for?

[glyph]

dont forget the new q9300 and q9450 are available now
- 9300 is replacement for 6600 (but more expensive )

both are not so good at overclocking and have smaller cache but use less power (might be better for home use if fan can be quieter!)
9300 is around 6% faster apparently..

[joconnell]

Ok jo thanks for the quick responce, Not a big fan of the Dell XPS then??!!! I'll bare that in mind. If the quadro's are aren't any good for max then what are they good for?

The quadros are very good but the way max is written it doesnt take any advantage of its power - The geforce cards are built to be as fast as possible under direct x since they're built for games and it comes in handy that 3dsmax performs very quickly using direct x acceleration. Other programs with decent openGL get a far bigger gap between a quadro and geforce.