I am building my first workstation, for modeling and animating in Maya 2009. I will be using the unlimited version so I can also learn/experiment with particles, fluids/dynamics, fur/hair, etc. Also, I will be using Photoshop, a compositing program, Mudbox, and learning the Unreal game engine, etc. If I get the chance, I would also like to experiment with stereoscopic 3D because of its growing use in the industry, although this is not my aim.
I cannot decide whether to go with an ATI Fire GL or Pro card or an Nvidia Quadro FX. The Fire Pro series seems appealing because of its faster memory technology and AutoDetect feature. The Quadro series seems appealing because of its consistent performance across a wide range of softwares and because its of larger memory bank.
As for processors, I cannot make up my mind between a dual Shanghai Opteron setup or a dual Nehalem Xeon setup. I know the new Xeons are powerful and will beat an Opteron one on one, but I have read they do not scale up the same way Opterons do in a multi-CPU environment due to a lack of optimized programs for hyper-threading.
How do the two processors and cards perform in the softwares listed above? Am I squabbling over differences that do not make that much difference? Is it even worth the wait for Istanbul? How much RAM is considered overkill?