Most cases come with a power supply, but you want to make sure that it's rated high enough to provide power to all of your internal components. A 350 -to- 450 watt, P4 ready or Athlon rated power supply is a necessary investment. Underpowering your system can be harmful. I use the Silencer 400 ATX from PC Power & Cooling. Other good brands are Enermax and Antec.

Any P4 or Athlon in the 1.7 - 2.2Ghz range will do for your workstation – the faster the better. Fast CPUs generate lots of heat, so you'll need to keep them cool with a large heatsink/fan combo. Most P4s are bundled with the proper heatsink, for Athlon XP's you should get an AMD recommended model, like the Thermaltake Volcano 6.

CPU recommendations: Intel P4A 2.2Ghz (Socket 423), AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (Socket A), Intel P4 2.0Ghz (Socket 478).

Motherboard
Based on your choice of CPU, you will now need to pick a compatible motherboard (also called the mainboard). This is determined by the motherboard's chipset and socket configuration. You can't put a P4 CPU into a motherboard built for an Athlon XP, and vice versa.

Other features to pay attention to: You'll want a fast front-side bus speed (this is the speed at which data shuttles around) like 100Mhz, many open RAM slots, a bunch of PCI slots (5-6 is good) for different upgrade cards, and a heavy-duty AGP Pro slot for your graphics card.

Motherboard recommendations: Asus P4T-E, AOpen AK 73 Pro, Soyo SY-K7V Dragon.

RAM
System memory (RAM) is yet another part of the CPU/motherboard choice equation. Once you've made those decisions, the RAM will pretty much pick itself for you. For an animation workstation you will want a minimum of 512MB of RAM. 1-2GB is even better. The motherboard will specify whether it takes DDR SDRAM, Rambus RDRAM or normal SDRAM. (RDRAM must be inserted in matched pairs, so buy accordingly.)

Memory recommendations: Crucial, Rambus, Corsair, Kingston.

Storage
The amount and speed of your hard drives will play a large role in the overall animation pipeline. When texture maps are pulled into RAM, rendered frames are stored, or video streams during playback, it is your hard drive that is working overtime. The bandwidth available for such data transfer is dependent on the interface between drive and motherboard, while the speed of the drive platters themselves is measured in revolutions per minute (RPMs).

The Ultra160 SCSI interface is just right for the job. It is capable of very fast, sustained data transfer, and is fun to say! IDE drives that use the ATA/100 or ATA/133 interface are plenty fast as well. Make sure that your motherboard can support the interface standard you want to use, or buy an adapter card like the Adaptec Ultra160 29160.

Drives that spin at 7200, 10,000 or 15,000RPMs are your best choice. Anything slower will create a data bottleneck. The size of the drives can have an impact on speed as well. A couple of 18GB drives is a better choice than one 36GB drive. In order to work most efficiently, it is a good idea to have one hard drive for your operating system (9GB), one for your applications (18GB-36GB) and a larger, cheaper one for storage (40GB-80GB).

Hard drive recommendations:
SCSI: Seagate Cheetah 36XL, IBM Ultrastar 36LZX.
IDE: Maxtor DM60, Western Digital WD1200.

Pros use powerful graphic cards like this Wildcat II 5110.

Graphics Card
If you are planning to run any 3D animation software effectively on your workstation, you'll want to invest in a professional-level OpenGL graphics card. These are the AGP Pro slot sittin', giant heat sink wearin', 128MB of onboard RAM bearin' monsters. The faster the graphics card, the easier it is to do your work. The cards to look for are the Wildcats, FireGLs, Quadros and Oxygens. While you can spend less on a gaming card like the GeForce3 and GeForce4, you will need to jump through some hoops and workarounds to get the most out of your 3D package.

If you plan on using dual monitors, be sure to check that your graphics card can support that. It is much easier to get one card that'll drive twin displays than it is to install two graphics cards in one system.

Graphics card recommendations: 3Dlabs Wildcat II 5110, ATI FireGL 4, Elsa QuadroDCC, 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX1. (Note: AWN plans to review the new Wildcat III line in a future article.)