[Venkatesh]

Awright,

It looks like you intend to work with Inventor and 3dsmax on this system you hope to build. Am I correct?

Autodesk Inventor does not require very much technological firepower to run. Pretty much any computer that boots will be able to use it. I run Inventor 5 on a Pentium 166mmx with 64mb of ram and a PCI Radeon 7500 (32mb sdram). In wireframe mode, it is very very usable.

To run Inventor well, that is a different story. I would recommend a P4 of at least 2.8ghz, preferrably on the Northwood process (.13 micron) or an Athlon XP of at least a 2500+ rating (Barton core preferrable, the extra 256k is good for inventor). I have never used an Athlon 64 myself, but I have heard only good things about their performance. I believe than an Athlon 64 2800+ or a 3000+ will be very good for Inventor-ing. To support either the P4 or Athlon XP/64 system, I would recommend a lot of good, fast ram. Nothing unnecessary here (CL2 ram is unnecessary IMHO), but PC2700 or PC3200 DDR would be excellent. 512MB of RAM should be enough for about anything today.

I would recommend sticking with a good, reliable graphics card. I have had only good experience with the Radeon 7500 and the Radeon 8500. In my desktop right now, I have a GeForce4 ti4400, which was very unstable at 4400 speeds. I have downclocked it to ti4200 speeds, which helped with reliability.