A dual core, dual Opteron system is overkill for most people. An Athlon 64 X2 will be a lot cheaper, and still give you great performance. And if you really need the additional rendering speed, you'd get better "bang for your buck" buying a "tricked out" X2 machine for your primary system, and then buying several more "bare bones" render-only systems to use as Render Cows. You could get 2-3 X2 systems, in addition to your 1 tricked out X2, all for the price of a single dual core dual Opteron workstation. All modern graphics cards support OpenGL "in hardware". The difference between the high end cards and the "gamer" cards is not as much as you'd think. 90% of the time they're based on the exact same chips. The differences are either in drivers (yes, just the drivers - Pro card drivers are optimized for stability and OpenGL viewport performance as opposed to games and raw speed), or small (but important) hardware features are turned on or off for respective versions. Sometimes both of these methods are used. This is why some people can often turn a non-pro card into a pro-level one, or a lower-end pro card into a higher end one. The pro cards also go through more stringent QA, and tend to be clocked more conservatively, so there are some qualitative differences which may show up in the end user experience, depending on the application. Generally speaking only high end 3D apps like Maya or Softimage really benefit from a Pro card. To my knowledge there is no conclusive or even anecdotal proof that Vue in particular runs better on Pro cards. Anyone have any experience with this? Bottom line: unless you really have just way too much money to spend, go for an X2 with some render slaves as needed, and don't bother with a high end Pro card. Maybe ask E-On for a recommended graphics card configuration and buy that, if anything. But any newer card from ATI or Nvidia should be fine. - Oshyan