Not a gaming machine.

Gaming machines are often centered around a very souped up single core CPU (Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, AMD Athlon FX). Expensive, the fastest you can get in single core, which is good for games, since many games cannot handle dual core systems well.
Gaming machines sometimes come equipped with two graphics card in SLI (nVidia term) or Crossfire (ATI term) mode. Which means that the cards work together in rendering the 3D scene graph, effectively doubling the graphics performance. Not needed for 3D modeling.

No, what you want is a powerful dual core or quad core CPU, oodles of RAM, at least 2 GB (though I recommend 4 GB or more), and a good graphics card with excellent OpenGL support.

If I were building a 3D graphics workstation right now, I'd use the following components:
Intel QX6700 quad core CPU
Intel BadAxe 2 mainboard
8 GB of DDR2 RAM, as 2x4 GB modules
nVidia 8800 based graphics card.
Seagate 7200.10 series hard disks (probably 2 disks)
DVD burner
2 flatscreen monitors, 19 inch, 1280 x 1024
Windows XP Pro 64 bit

In the Netherlands, this setup would cost around € 3500, including taxes.

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

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