lululee; The build it yourself option will get you the best, while minimizing the 'gimmicks' that could be a problem. I'd go with an Athlon X2. IF you are going to be waiting a little longer, I'd wait and see how the new AMR2 socket performs. That will make the Athlons DDR-2 capable, and faster memory is always good. Intel still has heat issues, and AMD has been functional in the real world for over a year, while Intel is still tossing new chips off left and right in paper launches. The Athlon 64's native 32 bit mode is proven and stable, so Win2k or XP will work just as smoothly as the still not fielded 64 bit OS M$ keeps talking about (XP 64 suffers a lack of support in drivers, and Vista is a complete unknown at the moment....but with a 1 gig memory requirement and even larger hard drive footprint, I'm not too eager) Spring for a sexy tower case. The reason being that most motherboards out there now are lousy with hard drive connectors. The Foxconn I'm running has 4 SATA connectors, and the dual IDE connectors for a total of 8 possible drives. Being able to just plug a new drive in makes life easier that trying to back a big one up and install a new one and reloading. One point. Make =sure= that the motherboard says that it supports SATA boot. Many of them don't; they assume, if you use the SATA drives, that you have created a RAID array. Booting off of a single SATA is impossible, although you don't find that out until you try and load the OS... If this is going to be a stict graphics computer, you might want to hunt out a lower end dual chip server board. With the X2 that would give you 4 cores, and more than enough potential memory to go crazy.... ;) SATA vs PATA. It depends. SATA is slightly faster, but the older PATA drives are lots cheaper, and run cooler to boot. If the motherboard supports both types, mixing them is no issue. SLI. Don't bother unless you game. Heat sinks. Since you are doing graphics, make sure whateve memory you buy has heat spreaders. You have to use the provided heat sink if you buy a boxed processor to keep from voiding your warranty, but if you get an OEM chip, or after the warranty expires, look at getting one of the copper monsters.