The processor of choice is an Intel Core i5, which is not as fast as a Core i7 but is more affordable. Studio 1 Productions has a useful page, Video Cards for Adobe Premiere CS5 and CS5.5, which lists dozens of Nvidia cards, tells you how many CUDA cores they have, and which cards are not recommended.
It's probably worth choosing Nvidia because Adobe's latest software now has a Mercury Playback Engine (MPE) that can use an Nvidia card's graphics processor to accelerate playback, effects and rendering. You can always upgrade the card later, as long as your PC has a big enough power supply. I suggest you get the fastest processor you can afford, after carefully checking the benchmark results, and settle for the best Nvidia graphics card you can get. A high-end graphics card such as Nvidia's GeForce 580 – designed to render games such as Battlefield 3 in real time - would take most of your budget. You should consider which of these is most important to you, though I suspect it doesn't make any practical difference. (If you were making a Pixar-style movie, you'd do the rendering separately on banks of servers, ie a renderfarm.) Viewing is, by contrast, a graphics-intensive process, where the faster the graphics card the better. The rendering process is compute-intensive, so the faster the processor, and the more cores it has, the better. Running software such as Blender and Adobe After Effects usually involves two different activities: rendering and viewing. In all cases, you also need a graphics card that supports OpenGL, and as much graphics memory as possible. However, the specification for a production machine – the sort of professional rig you have in mind – includes a multi-core processor and 8-16GB of memory. Most mainstream desktop PCs are now better than that. Blender, now open source, still runs on a single-core 1GHz PC with only 512MB of memory, according to the website, and for "good specs" it recommends a 2GHz dual core processor with 2GB of memory. Still, we used to render graphics and create animations a decade ago – possibly using Blender – when PCs were much less powerful than they are today.
That could mean buying a refurbished PC, shopping on eBay, or assembling your own machine, though I wouldn't really recommend that if you have no previous experience. The usual adage in computing is: "Fast, cheap, good: choose any two." It's easy to spend £2,500 on a PC for 3D modelling and animation, so you will appreciate that £500 is a challenge. I know that to do all this, I'll need to spend a decent amount, but I'm working with a £400-500 budget. I am learning how to use Blender, and I hope to add Unity 3D for game designing, Adobe After Effects and Premiere. I want to buy a desktop PC to do 3D modelling and rendering.
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