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I don't think ideal exists and the throttle is the person using the machine.
Putting any software on a Windows machine immediately slows its performance and uninstalling that software won't give you back performance.
Pick a purpose AND STICK TO IT. In your case you want a machine for gaming and a machine for astroimage processing. Therefore you have TWO purposes. How I've done this in the past for the CG industry is you have two OS hard drives, put your games and office crap, one a third drive and your CG apps on a fourth, a fifth drive is ultra high speed type with two partitions (understand the different between a drive and a partition then reread my post) which you dedicate to putting page files and temp/working space for each OS drive. So these days you use SSD drives for each of these and the point isto reduce I/O queues due to the software wanting to read part of a hard drive and the OS needing to read from a different part of the same drive plus the pagefile wanting to update another all at the same just because you pressed "Open file" in a program. So you gain performance plus stability by separating them. The page file drive you should fully format periodically to ensure it performs well and hasn't developed errors from stress. You don't need TB for an OS drive or a Programs drive, 240GB is plenty and you want performance. Add TB drives for temporary storage, but a RAIDED pair Could be used for where you put your source frames and generated registered etc frames too as you can eat up drive space fast, but again reformat periodically.
Anyway I yet to use my dual gfx cards for anything in my atrophotography so use whatever cards you want but not all software will use multiple cores/cpus so I would say go with fast cpu (higher GHz). Age of CPUs will matter, we've had 3.0GHz (not overclocked) Intel CPUs for 15yrs so a current generation 2.4GHZ i7 I bet will give you better performance than a 5yr old 2.4GHz Xeon plus will.
Money no object, I would get dual cpu of whatevers todays best intel cpu is, not necessarily the fastest but close with most cores. Simple way to calculate would be Speed * Cores = processing power and rank them that way choosing the best ranking power.
RAM and GFx cards are easier to upgrade reliably down the track, so for initial outlay you can save there.
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