Since you're going for a brand, you won't get the best Poser CPU (AMD Athlon64). For $2000, I built my newest rig around an Athlon64x2 4400+, 4 GB Kingston HyperX DDR400 Dual Channel, Geforce 7800 GTX, 2x73 GB 10,000 RPM SATA (no RAID), Arctic Freezer CPU fan, a good PSU and some extra case fans. Blows any Intel baced rig out of the water. Again, Poser will not use the second core. But Vue (and Maya) will. A test with Vue revealed that the dual core machine is indeed twice as fast when rendering compared to the single core variety (Athlon64 3500+, and there's nothing slow about that CPU either!). As a home user I NEVER buy brand computers. Way too expensive. But last week I purchased 20 Dell workstations plus a server for my job, including 3 yrs on site service (8 hours). Brand computers are good for large IT envirnoments, where you really need consistency among the machines, and wehre you really need the support a brand can deliver. For home users, brand computers are way, way too expensive.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

My gallery   My freestuff