I built my own and this is what i used
Asus A7N8X mother board
Athlon xp processor 2.08 Barton core
ATI Radeon 9700 graphics card 128 megs onboard memory
Two Serial ata harddrives raided
one Western digital 60gig for storage
one gig of ram
swapped plextor rewriter and 40 speed cdrom from my old system
and included a Plextor 712a dvd rewriter
Thermaltake Xaser11 case
also recently fitted a card reader to speed up picture transfer the camera is way to slow when you have a full 1gig microdrive to download

software
windows xp service pack 2
Photoshop 6
photoshop elements 3
ACDSee 6
i use a 5.25 digital camera which gives me a tiff file of between 3 to 5 megs depending on picture size setting
outputed to a IIyama tft monitor set to 1280 x 1024 colour quality 32bit
it shifts large files around very quickly but sadly now its out of date.
So go for the biggest bestest fastest bang for your buck
Oh and go for broadband internet service dialup is way to slow.

Hope this helps you
Regards
Brian