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Pentium 4 3.0E LGA 775
Gigabyte Mobo, 865P chipset
1GB (2x512) Corsair Value select RAM
Sapphire Radeon 9600XT
120GB SATA HDD
CDRW drive
17" LCD monitor
Case with 400W PSU
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I'd personally go with a Socket 478 CPU, namely the Pentium 4 2.4C or the 2.8C. A good Socket 478 board will be cheaper than an LGA 775 board and thus would allow you to move up to the i875 chipset series. Also the Pentium 4 C series (Northwood core, 512KB L2 Cache) have a lower operating temperature range, which will allow for less exotic cooling systems. Other than that, a great system for pretty much anything. It will perform workstation-class tasks with easy.
The last workstation-class system I used was a Pentium 4 2.0GHz (Socket 423), 256MB of dual-channel PC1066 RDRAM, and a Quadro4 750XGL. That i850-based system was the most stable computer I ever used, but it is not tremendously powerful by today's standards.
Unless you are doing very serious rendering/CAD/CAM/CAE, a terribly (excessively) powerful computer will be useless and will just consume lots of power. I used Inventor for three years on a Pentium 166MHz, 64MB RAM, and a 2MB ATI mach64 (i could get 15fps in wireframe mode!). I never could use 3ds max on it however...