If you were doing cad work I would recommend a proper workstation with a mid range quadro card (which would eat into your budget like there’s no tomorrow). But you’re doing 3D modelling in lightwave… I haven’t touched lightwave in a few years but they were behind the times a bit in terms of leveraging GPU power for much of anything other than real time rendering.
Hopefully that changed, but regardless I think, for your needs, I can recommend a non workstation GPU.
Of course if you are running one now, you might miss some features. Take a look at Nvidia’s list of features for quadro cards and see if you can live without them: NVIDIA Quadro Legacy Products
Applications like most of adobe’s suite will take advantage of any modern gaming GPU to accelerate many functions, which is why I would say stick to that unless you know a workstation card like the quadro is something you really need. All prices US $, sorry, hopefully they aren’t that much more expensive down under.
You want this baby to last and to do a lot of number crunching so I would recommend an intel “sandy bridge” processor. The i7 2600K will serve you very well, as will the cheaper i5 2500K. The “K” series allows for a lot of overclocking headroom, giving you more bang for your buck in terms of performance.
- i7 2600k $315
- i5 2500k $219
Any compatible motherboard (socket LGA 1155) would be fine. You want as many SATA 6 ports and USB 3 ports as you can get for an affordable price. You’ll need at least 1 PCIe X16 slot as well for your GPU. You should be able to find something for $80-$150.
For your GPU I’d go with an Nvidia GTX 560 ti. I doubt you would get much of a noticeable boost in performance going with anything more powerful, at least not int he applications you plan on using most of the time. And it will max out most modern games at 1080p resolution, and should handle tomorrow’s game just fine as well.
RAM is something you want a lot of. It’s cheap and its something your type of work gobbles up. HIgh resolution images, high resolution video, effects, textures, etc, etc all need a large buffer. 16 GB is no something I’d recommend to a gamer, but you would benefit.
Hard drive space is yet another thing that you probably want lots off. It’s also cheap. You should be able to pick up a2 TB spindle drive for around $100. You might want to invest in an SSD as your primary drive where you have your OS and programs running, while keeping the 2 TB one for a storage drive. It’s how I roll, and the responsiveness of my PC is now something I would not want to give up. SSD’s are expensive however, so look for a sweetspot between space/performance and price.
That’s the core of your PC. You’ll also need a Power supply, I’d recommend you don’t skimp there. Choose something with a high efficiency and at least 600 Watts.
The case is all about what you like aesthetically, and the features that make assembling your PC easier.