I'm with silverblade. Making your own box saves several thousand dollars and you can ensure that you have the very best quality components for whatever general price strata you want to work in. And ASUS with the nVidia chipset is a tremendously good motherboard. Ditto on the 500 watt or better PSU (but maybe Antec instead of "Antexc.") Also, using one or more sets of serial ATA disks with Raid Stripe 1 setup on an ASUS motherboard makes your system very fast, smooth and near bullet-proof. RAID Stripe 1 means that you have two identical physical hard disk drives mirroring each other with every disk write. If one fails, your second disk should be OK. You simply replace the failed drive with a new one, and you're off to the races again. A RAID Stripe 1 system is not a subsitute for a decent backup habit, mind you, but it will often save you from yourself or the malicious computer gods, and do so at a reasonable expense. If you are thinking about one of the higher-end versions of Vue, 2 GB of RAM is more or less a must. Finally, there are many excellent online retailers - to help you save even more money. (There are some scuzzy ones out there, too, of course. But, as a general rule, online retailers that sell components for "Mods" or us "Modders" - computer case/system modifications or people who modify their own systems are usually pretty reliable and have integrity, regardless of which country you're in. Failing the desire to work on your own computer guts, I'm with krimpr. BOXX machines are very solid (if expensive) and usually much better for our kind of work than the Alienware boxes. Alienware used to be excellent about three years ago, but they started catering more to the gamer crowd than to the 3d crowd. You'll find a screamer video card in each Alienware box, but for 3d, if you purchase one of those, you generally will have wasted quite a bit of money, since your video card is not critical to rendering scenes. (But, it is critical to playing high-end games with high-end graphics.) If was buying a fairly expensive ready-made box (something I've never done), I would ask to know which motherboard is in it. A motherboard is not a significant part of the expense, but a quality motherboard will have a high-end "northbridge chip" - one that controls the disk drives among other things, and it will have a very high "throughput" or "FSB" (front sideboard") speed. You're almost guarenteed a quality, stable, reliable board with ASUS. MSI makes great boards also, but they can be a bit fluky or touchy on the higher-end boards. I'd also like to know the maker of the video card, and of the RAM memory sticks. In general, there are only two decent video card makers now (ATI and nVidia), and its nice to have 512 MB of video ram if you can afford it. (But 256 MB will do.) You want reputable RAM for a stable machine. If the RAM maker is not identified or identifiable, you should skip it. (Or insist on a brand name RAM manufacturer.)