Considering a Dual CPU system...help me out

[Samjham]

I may be building a new system soon which will be mostly used as a workstation for creating and rendering scenes in Maya 4.5. I'm thinking that I want to build a dual CPU system with about 1gig of RAM. The graphics card is not that important to me, I mainly want advice on which CPU and mtherboard to get. I'm leaning towards AMD CPU's but I haven't kept up on the latest technology and need advice on which direction to go.

So, should I go Athlon, or P4? Which CPU would be a good buy (I don't want the fastest CPU...I'm on a budget)?

Which motherboard?

thanks

Edit: I think that I should also add that this machine will not be overclocked much if any. Stability is the most important thing to me because I can't have a system crash in the middle of a batch render.

Is it true that the Athlon XP's need to be modded to run in a Dual setup?