If you are going to be using those tools, I'd still recommend a pro level card since you won't get any hardware acceleration during your workflow with a consumer level card. Its not a limitation of the consumer cards, but rather drivers and 3ds don't code for them. They like to keep their hardware pool a little smaller than normal.
If you got 2k to work with, well then, that jumps you up to a whole level of new hardware parts to play with. Here's what I had in mind:
As you can tell, I didn't include the price of a video card. Here's two choices I'd throw at you and you pick.
I'd say afford the best card you can if you think you plan on working with very complicated scenes. Honestly, I think the best price/performance for you is going to be the V5900 card. Nvidia Quadro cards are very good contenders, but I honestly can't find vendors out there that sells them for a reasonable price; I'm just not too familiar with all of the vendors that sells business level parts in UK/Europe. Here in the states, the Quadro 2000D and 4000 would be direct competitors to the v5900 and v7900 with a very similar price point.
I guess just shop around and see who sells them; also check with your school if they have approved vendor lists since sometimes you can buy professional gear/equipment through the school through a vendor that's partnered with your school for educational discount. I know they did this with my art school, but it wasn't something crazy cheap still; maybe like 5% off, but that's still quite a bit of savings when you are talking about 400-700+ USD cards.
I'm sure if you are doing game design work/modeling you'd probably be happy with the v5900 or the quadro 2000D, I have a few friends who have that level of card (they actually use the older FX that's about the same performance) and its plenty powerful for their needs.
As for the rest of the system, I bumped you up to the more expensive hexa-core unlocked i7 3930k on the lga 2011 socket. This bloats your cost a bit, but for multi-threaded applications like content creation, those two extra cores (4 threads in total) really do help out and no matter how good the i7 2600k or the next gen ivy bridge i7 3770k, they won't match the performance for what you will be doing.
Paired with the cpu is the Corsair H100 cpu cooler. I could have went with a cheaper H80 or even with an aircooler, but this allows a lot of cooling abilities to really overclock your cpu and keep it cool. Honestly, you might be better off with getting a proper liquid cooled kit like the
XSPC RS750 2x120mm cpu cooling kit. Everything comes included and roughly the same price as the H100. Not exactly sure where you buy water cooling parts in Europe, but FrozenCPU has it and I'm fairly confident they'd ship overseas... Not sure.
I picked the fairly nice Asus mobo with some great features and compared to other lga 2011 boards, it's actually the cheapest that sports 8 ram slots. You can go cheaper with 4 ram slots like the lga 1155 boards, but honestly having that much ram in your system is going to help for work. Speaking of RAM, I doubled up and went with 8x4gb modules for a total of 32GB. You could go with 8gb modules for double the cost, but I'd probably say 32GB would be more than sufficient for your needs.
Like you said, I doubled up the SSD, upgrade the green drive to a proper 7200rpm, but kept the same power supply. Even with a more powerful processor, its actually not too bad at power consumption and the pro level videocards don't exactly eat through power like consumer gaming cards do (some higher level pro card do though). 600w should be sufficient, but maybe look at getting a more efficient unit like on silver or gold 80+ standard.
Now the only thing I have to say that I'd probably really recommend to upgrade is the case. I cheap'ed out and stayed with a similar NZXT compact/mid sized tower case that will work, but if your budget allows for it, I'd upgrade to a bigger and better unit that can handle your cooling needs. You can look at Corsair 400r, 600t, Cooler Master 922, 932, 690 II advance or the storm series as well as NZXT's higher end Phantom cases; Silverstone, Antec and Lian Li also make great cases that would work. But like I said, if you won't want to add too much cost, the Source 220 will work; you can mount the radiator on top and be rocking just as hard with your 3ds.
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Please help me choose the best hardware to build a super-ish computer for my graphics design course using mainly 3ds MAX.
therefore, although I am aware of the impending arrival of Kepler goodness, my studies just cant wait...But I will definitely take up the EVGA step up option, thanks.
newbie!
BTW, which link did you request about win 08 r2, this here? 
sorry i may have misled you abit there coz i certainly cant go over 2k, not until i finish and get a really good project... from your advice I have decided to concentrate on modelling game levels (am currently doing this) and maybe pursue cgi later - when I'll obviously have to sign my life off for a huge loan!
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