Does anyone have any tips for building a PC for major 3d Rendering (Maya) or art in general (Photoshop, etc.)? I dunno if I should just build on the specifications of the program so if anyone experienced could help out, I'd appreciated it. =D ~Aero

lots of ram.
fast, multi-core processor.
loads of storage.

next question.

Unless you're planning on creating high-end cinematics (in which case I suggest a small render farm ;)), any gaming PC with a decent graphics card will do fine. Good OpenGL support (NVidia) and lots of graphics RAM is a bonus.

For programming, a fast hard drive works wonders, as do multi-core cpus (eg. MSVC compiles multiple projects at the same time if the dependency chain allows it)

Most graphics cards have dual DVI connectors nowadays, and using multiple monitors really helps (multiple / larger views for your art package, view debugger & game at the same time for your IDE).

-Markus-

Im building a new system soon.

Intel Q9450 quad core (coming out march 17th)
8GB DDR II, 800Mhz cl4 (DDR III is to expensive and will be for a wile)

motherboard i would sugest if you dont plan on using SLI or CROSSFIRE,
A X38, or X48 chipset (the X48 chipset will be out around march 17th to)

as for a GFX card, name a price you want to spend on it and ill find one,
I my self am running a Geforce 8800 GTS 640mb card that i have had for almost 1½ years now.

Nvidia has started to launch the Geforce 9 series, and should come out with high end 9 series cards soon.

If you are serious about Maya take a look at their hardware compatibility charts since your vidcard has to be capable of hardware overlay planes last time I checked.

If Maya rendering is what you do, then the more cores the better. A single quad-core chip is the minimum you should be looking at. Two quad-core chips would be better, although that means using Xeon chips which are more expensive.

Also, if you're running Maya, that's an application where a Quadro FX board makes sense. The Quadro supports overlay rendering (which Maya uses) and anti-aliased lines (which make for a higher frame rate when navigating scenes).

Also, the more memory the better. If you're running 64-bit Windows or MacOS, I would recommend 8 GB if RAM.

Unless you're doing something amazing, let's start with a basic system like Dual-core, 2Gb RAM, decent video card.

In order of preference, my top things to add on would be:
1)2 BIG monitors, 21" or more but ideally like 24"
2)More memory - up to 4Gb
3)Fast storage, maybe some sort of RAID mirrored thing