Hi,

First, get a nice tube while you can. A 19" Hitachi is very nice. I've not seen a 21", but if you can get one with a large enough bandwidth and small enough dot pitch that would be great if you can afford it. Hitachi's getting out of the CRT monitor business soon (if they haven't already).

Get SCSI. Ultra-160 may have been superceded on the desktop now. You'll get arguments about whether you should get Adaptec or something else. SCSI puts less load on the system and you have a lot more flexibility in adding more drives than with IDE. (Though you'll probably still want IDE for DVD, CD-RW and the like). But SCSI can easily add $500-$1000 to the cost of a top-of-the-line IDE PC. If you want hardware RAID it'll jack up the price too.

Get a USB-2 and FireWire interface. That way you can hook up your USB-2 devices and Firewire digital camera and digital camcorder. You do have those too, don't you? ;-)

What OS are you planning to use? Does it support SMP? You might want an SMP motherboard. SMP motherboards can cost $200 - $500 depending on the CPU sockets and what peripherals are integrated.

If you're limited to $3k, I'd say wait or get something else. Or go to Bali. Unless you really can't think of what else to spend the money on.

I had a similar dilema a couple of months ago. Spend $2-2.5K for a system with the best of everything, or $1k for a good-enough PC. I decided for the good enough box (refurbished Compaq Presaio 7000 US (1.2 GHz Athlon, 128 MB, 80 GB, DVD, CD-RW, 32 MB TNT2, SB audio, modem, 10/100 NIC, USB + Firewire), 768 MB Crucial RAM (to max it out), refurbished 19" Hitachi CM771). I wish it had SCSI, but I'm happy.

Good luck with your decision.

Cheers,
Scott.