In this market, there is not a large advantage in building your own machine, as far as cost goes. There is still some, but the margin is lower than ever before. If you are not an experienced system integrator, I would definitely recommend getting a name-brand rig (Boxx, Dell, not IBM -- IBM is overpriced, and the prices that I've seen for IBM machines reflect my mother's employee discount). The most uber-badass workstation rig money can buy is the brand-spanking-new HP Itanium2 box... or at least, it will be when running native software. Since there isn't any native software that is of use for content creation on the Itanium as yet (at least not that you can buy), the next best bet is a dual Xeon rig, using Intel's e7505 (I think) motherboard, and the 3.06 GHz Xeon DP that was just released with a 1 MB cache. If you're a little patient, the 2 GHz Opterons should be available in just a couple of weeks (it's due for launch on August 5th), if there aren't any more delays. At 1.8 GHz it's very fast, but at 2.0 GHz it might well be king of the desktop for a few weeks. Graphics... cost no object, get a FireGL or Quadro, though to be honest I'm sticking to the Radeon and GeForce families myself. The Radeon 9800Pro is the present king of the hill. These cards are getting to be so powerful that it is getting harder and harder to justify the higher price tag for the Quadro and FireGL boards that use the same processors and memory. Still... for a no-holds-barred monster machine, I'd just go to www.boxxtech.com and rig up the highest-end Xeon DP or dual Opteron rig I could finagle with their online configurator. :)