My current employer has given me the opportunity to design my own GIS workstation. The problem is I have no idea what is important when it comes to hardware! I have been given a datasheet from Fujitsu which includes the latest CELSIUS M720 series workstations but the configuration includes about 30 different processors, graphics cards, and hard drives.

I will be working a lot with the ESRI desktop suite (spatial analyst and 3D analyst) and doing a fair amount of raster processing (DEMs, visibility analysis, etc.), but I also use the GDAL library, SAGA-GIS, Quantum GIS and others. Does ArcGIS 10 actually use multiple cores?

I have the choice from 4 cores with 8 threads up to 8 cores with 8 threads - 16 threads?

Is SSD SATA III better than HDD SATA III?

The Celsius R920 supports up to 512 GB RAM. But what do I need?

It will probably be the last time I get a new workstation for the next 5 years, so I am curious what others have ordered or feel will be necessary for the coming years. Obviously the cloud isn't taking over as quick as they say!