I need the most powerful and fast computer.

I would like to build the fastest computer possible. Not the best bang for the buck.

It will be used for video editing and rendering.. BR disc authoring and transcoding. 3D animation work and Photoshop high res. picture manipulation.

My budget is large enough to build what I want..

So I would appreciate any suggestions as to CPU, moterboard, drives, graphics card, etc. etc..

 

If price is not an obstacle, then why not start here?
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4240162&Sku=CP1-I7-965

 

At a certain point, spending more money on more expensive parts really doesn't increase performance very much.

Here is a 5,000$ PC built by tomshardware.com
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-overclock-i7,2145.html

it is mainly for gaming, but I predict it would be able to do anything else well also.

 

Look at this: http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/495-puget-systems-extreme.html
$16,000, This particular computer has four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, two VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID1, and six 1 TB hard drives in RAID 5.

 

its simple.

Get a core i7 the 920 will be okay but if you want you can get the 940.

Get 2 GTX 295 in SLI

get a Mobo that will support triple SLI if you want and get 3 GTX 295

make sure you have a 1000+ watt PSU for something like that,
get the OCZ reaper ram, get 12gb of it(2 tripple channel ram)

with that you will be golden.

 

That is one UGLY machine! What a mess.

 

It looks as if for now a i7 965, asus p6t, 12 GB ram GTX 295 will my best choice.

 

If you are doing video rendering/editing and 3D animation work with OpenGL and not gaming you may want to look into getting a NVIDIA Quadro card. NVIDIA Quadro cards are built for 3D rendering video rendering etc. http://www.nvidia.com/page/qfx_uhe.html