I built a pretty similar machine to this in December.
I would run on the AMD Athlon 64 bit processor, I am running on the 53 fx chip, there is now a fx 55, be prepared to drop 800 bucks. You can then also be able to finally get up to 6.4 gigs/ second of ram.
Asus motherboard with a raid mirror. I am running the asus sk8n nvidea nforce 3 pro 150 mortherboard. Very stable motherboard, upgradeable downloads at the asus website is also easy to get. With a raid, if you have a harddrive crash, like so many of us have had that experience, it helps to safeguard you from that. I run on a raid and love the idea it automatically backs up everything for me.
A video card with 256 mb memory. I am running on the asus fx 5700 and its 128mb and it runs perfectly well. When you get yours, make sure it will working with your platform, 32 bit (pentium 4)or 64 (whats coming out next month finally). Or you can get the video card that will run 4 monitors simutaneously, cost on that 1200.00. They have one at Iowa State University.
I would get at least 2 300 gig 10k rpm sata hard drives. Sata run more efficiently and 10k even better. 300 gig so you got plently of space and room to grow.
Now for opticals, you have to have a floppy drive to get the raid to work. However, I went with one that is a 7 in 1 flash card reader. Hooks up through usb, you dont have to have software etc to download pics from different brands of cameras, and no card readers flopping around on your desk. Cost 35.00 bucks. I bought mine at
www.dymincomputer.com.
2 52 cd read writes. Now why on earth would you want that. So you can run a copy of the images on 2 cds at the same time. 1 to keep and 1 to give to the model or client. I pulled my old ones from my previous computer before throwing it off of my apartment balcony. I am waiting until these crash, because they are so darn loud.
Then buy a dvd burner. I went with an asus brand 1408p. I bought it on
www.newegg.com for 80 dollars with shipping. 14 speed writing dvds, 8 speed rw. But I went with it so it would be quieter.
Liquid cooled case. No fans running to drive you nuts, if you have any clients around, they can talk to you without YELLING. Some of these cases are down right lound, and make sure you get a case that you can upgrade stuff in without having to pull out power tools to mod the case.