I went with AMD because it's soooo much cheaper. If you do though, choose your MoBo carefully. Stay away from boards with a VIA chipset, they've been known to cause problems with audio apps and soundcards in the past. Apparently many of these problems are resoved now, but I'd stay away from them anyways, just to be safe. Make sure your RAM is PC2100 or higher (and your MoBo supports that rate) - nice and fast! Good choice of soundcard (M-Audio's drivers are rock solid), and dual monitor is the way to go! it rocks! I've always had good luck with IBM hard drives. Check out their Deskstar series. At any rate, make sure your drives are at least 7200 RPM. Use one for your system stuff and software, and the other one for all your audio storage. What kind of software will you be using?
Check out www.ncix.com to build your own system. that's where i did mine and i've had no trouble at all!