Hi Zescanner Buy a (desktop)computer with a decent powerpack 650+ and as much ventillation (fans) as possible, base it on an AMD it's pipeline arrangements are much more suited to 64-bit (the future) put yourself out to get the dual core version Athlon 64 x2 (AMD Opteron if you like spending serious money) some of the earlier ones have dropped in price, although not many programmes directly support multi-threading at the moment, Windows does support multi-threading and the programmes will have a whole CPU to themselves and of course you will see significant speed increases over a single cored unit (this includes games), and don't forget the operating system, all 3D rendering is floating point intensive and a 64-bit OS combined with a 64-bit CPU will dramatically improve it, and has very efficient memory handling, the earlier investment will be worth it. The graphics card needs to be OpenGL 2+ to be future proof for 3D packages and DirectX 9+ for games there is a bit of a grey area here but! You'll have to strike a happy balance, with as much video memory as possible 256MB will alleviate the textures taking up the main memory and is far quicker. the graphics card doesn't effect the rendering times but the setting up of the scene takes a lot of time as well and if it's lagging will not only be annoying but extend the overall time. Get a motherboard with Dual-Channel memory support and two sticks, the more memory the better, 4 gigabyte+ will be a much more flexible system and handle larger more complex scenes and won't have to use your harddrive as a temporary storage. Sorry about the techno babble, this will be quite expensive I'm not sure how much you want to spend, let me know if you need to know more specifics and detailed explanations. Chris