Personal opinion here, your best bet would be dual Intel Xeon DP processors, they will be coming down in price quite a bit in the next 2 weeks ( I believe ). Intel makes a top notch workstation board, they sell it as a server board, however, this board has an 8x agp slot, this is the same board that I understand IBM is using. The Intel board is SE7505VB2. Unless you are rendering something really hugh, you should be able to get by with 1 gig of memory. The video card is not real important if all your are going to do is render. If memory serves me correctly, you can get the above combo for less that 1100 dollars, at least from the vendor that I use. Any questions, feel free to email or IM me. skydiver