The nForce4's were just announced, and won't be available for at least another month in any volume. Even then they will be much more expensive, relatively speaking, than a KT800 or nForce3-based solution, and the benefits for today's systems are questionable at best. Next generaton Serial ATA drive support? No drives available yet. Gigabit ethernet? Who has a gigabit switch, and multiple other gigabit systems to network with? It certainly won't help on your broadband downloads. The built-in firewall might be useful, but there are quite a number of free and fairly low CPU consumption firewall options available, and they're probably more easily customizable (there are no reviews of this feature yet). PCI Express support? There are basically no performance differences thus far. If you're going for SLI, then yes it's the best option, but that's only something I'd do if I had a lot of money to play with. A single graphics card is going to be fine for most users. We haven't heard much about their performance tuning feature yet, and that is more aimed at the casual overclocker if I understand it correctly, so it's not something I'm too interested in. If you're going for Athlon 64, you'll actually get the most bang for your buck out of the socket 754 3400+. At 2.4Ghz, 512KB cache, single channel memory controller it's actually as fast in clock speed as the latest Athlon 64 4000+! It's only missing the 1MB cache and dual channel memory controller, neither of which increase performance enough to get even close to justifying the several hundred dollar price difference. Socket 754 motherboards are also cheaper than 939's. And, since AMD is coming out with dual core processors next year, that will signal a price drop for the single cores I would say. So if you're serious about Vue, want performance, but don't want to pay the moon for it, I'd recommend buying a 3400+ on the 754 socket now, and then in a year or so buy a dual core machine or a discounted single core at high clock rate. Use the machine you buy now as a render box. Here's a Newegg Wishlist I put together for a friend that has pretty much everything you'll need: http://secure.newegg.com/app/WishR.asp?ID=994218 I ended up buying a very similar system in components from Newegg (different motherboard, RAM and Hard Drive), total cost at the end was $1400 or so including tax and shipping. We bought the RAM straight from Crucial, a 1GB DIMM, because it was a bit cheaper there and they have a compatibility guarantee. Otherwise everything came from Newegg. The machine is kicking all sorts of ass so far, in everything we throw at it, from rendering to gaming. And it was a pleasure to work in the case, too. Very well designed, and it comes with a good power supply as well - cheap at the price. The Radeon 9800 Pro on there will be more than enough for your Vue needs. So unless you're a gamer, don't bother spending the extra $150+ for a 6800GT. If you are a gamer, and have the money to burn, a 6800GT is one of your better buys. The sweet spot for that market segment has shifted back to Nvidia for now. - Oshyan