A few points: While the closer in speed to your main system the renderboxes are the better, with Vue the rule pretty much is that if a system can run the OS needed, it's acceptable. When I started my garden, the smallest box in the system was an Athlon 700 (the slot A Sega card type), with a glorious 384 megs of PC-100 SDRAM. It was slow, but it was stable (running Win2kPro). A router isn't needed (unless you are on DSL or Cable). Much of the networking info is already set in Vue and the cows. If you have multiple boxes, all you need is one of the 5 port switches. The HyperVue manager should find the external boxes just fine. If the box you are getting has a NIC port on the back, you don't need the network card; it already has one built onto the motherboard. Not only do you not need sound, uninstall any sound drivers; they will slow you down, as they demand a certain % of your resources that could be used elsewhere. If there is onboard video, then pull the video card, uninstall the drivers for that, and use the integrated solution. Unless you are planning to use the renderbox for other things, you don't need more than a minimal video capability. Once the OS and rendercow is installed, you don't need the CD/DVD drive and can disconnect or remove it. If you plan on having multiple renderboxes, you may want to invest in that KVM setup, only snag a cheapy 14" LCD to go with a separate mouse and keyboard. Most KVM switches have circuitry that fools the unselected computers into thinking that the mouse and keyboard are still attached to it, but the slightest power flicker can cause that mess up, locking up some or all of your unselected boxes.