I recommend a custom built system consisting of high quality components. Mainboard: MSI/Asus/Abit/Gigabyte. I tend to go with MSI. The newer MSI Socket 939 mainboards can connect up to 8 drives (4x parallel ATA, 4x SATA), and I've even seen boards with 4xPATA 8xSATA. Chipset: nForce4. Accept no less. CPU: if you can afford it, dual Opteron dual cores. Vue 5 Infinite will love it. Will make for a very pricey mainboard though (Tyans are among the best when it comes to multi CPU boards). If that's too much, Athlon64 4400x2 is a sweet fast CPU, fully ready for 64 bit operating systems (did anyone say Vista?) and a good MSI mainboard for an Athlon64 costs about $100 or less. Disk drives: multiple SATA drives. At least two. WD Raptors are FAST, but expensive. I'd recommend two smaller very fast drives for OS, swapfile and applications, plus a larger slower drive for mass storage. Buy a good PSU with plenty of power. Fortron is good. Pabst is good. Zalman is good. 400W minimum. Good PSUs deliver stabler output, prolonging the life of your mainboard and CPU, and they're usually fairly quiet. The boxed cooler included with the CPU does the job. Fairly silent too. Graphics card: for Vue you want a GOOD OpenGL card. The professional graphics cards are the best, of course, but they're also very expensive. My personal favorite is the 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm series, but the cheapest one starts out at $800 or so. Brr. A decent nVidia consumer card (6600 GT, 7800 series) will do fine without costing an arm and a leg. If your budget allows for it, you could go for an nVidia QuadroFX or ATI FireGL. My personal experience with ATI consumer graphics cards isn't very positive. OpenGL support was definitely not good. Lots of Vue and Poser crashes. My old Ti4200 was both more stable and faster than the Radeon 9600 Pro. Don't fall for the SLI hype. You could go for an SLI mainboard and a single graphics card, upgrading to a second graphics card later on, when 3D applications are starting to make use of it. Right now SLI is only useful for the most demanding 3D games. Case: a good one. I'd suggest a midtower with plenty of space for extra drives, extra fans, expansion boards. Good brands are Antec, Coolermaster, Zalman. Chieftec isn't bad either. Chieftec cases come with a decent PSU, the other cases come without PSU. For a 4400x2 plus a powerful graphics card the PSU included with the Chieftec is not enough, however. Or - a BOXX workstation. Prices range from expensive to outrageous, but you will have an extremely fast and reliable machine, plus lots and lots of support.

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