The latest configuration I showed in the last message was close to 8 grand with the slowest speed cpu. It also included two 20 inch monitors which I will probably forgo so I can get the price down to 5. I figure that comes out to 1 grand a year if I can keep it going for 5 years which is usually what I do. I will probably pick-up the monitors locally. It does seem like the dual processors or dual-core cpus will be good initially for doing an area render and jumping out to your email or whatever. Each app would be running in its on processor. In time, we would hope the products we use would begin to use the new power in the OS, CPUs and video cards. There does seem to be a real difference though between the specifications and the precision of the video boards targeted for the gaming community those targeted at the workstation crowd. The later are more precise and have many unigue capabilites that only the premium products ever use. SLI seems to be targeted more toward the gaming world. I have been focusing on the workstation/precision card where getting the right pixel is more important than getting a close-enough pixel blazingly fast. This is because I understand that the majority of the render speed issues are with the CPU, memory and virtual memory.