The 9600 is outdated and will not fit the newer AGP or SLI card slots, which have different wattages different bus speeds that can cause unnecessary wait states and hick-ups when using older cards.

 

Motherboards are usually a matter of personal preference, as some like Gigabyte, others Asus, and still others Intel. Intel based boards are the most supported, but Microsoft is trying to change that with the partnership of AMD and ATI. Soon AMD will put a chipset on ATI video cards so that they will be compatible with DX10.  

 

NewEgg, TigerDirct are good sources of boards and cards, or combo's. If you choose a motherboard, you want a 24 Pin ACPI Power supply, a board that can handle the extra wattage for a video card, which is usually 300 watts per card or more. Do not under power a motherboard with duel CPUs and Video Cards. A Duo Core 2.6 or better is nice, but very expensive, a Pentium D 3 gig is good. The quad cores are not yet supported in a way that Vue can take full advantage. Yes look for a board that can handle 4 gigs of memory or more. The more memory you can install the bigger the scenes and the quicker the render. Get DDRII memory with low latency PC5300 or better. Above all else make sure the board is fully compatible with the x64 platform, and especially if you are to use Vista.

 

Remember the CPUs do the processing not the video card. The video card simply takes the rendering engines info and posts to the screen. A couple of SATA 300 gig drives are nice.

 

Currently if you are to run a video card with a little muscle, you will have to have an ATI x1650 or X1950, and for Nvidia any cards above 7800 should work well with XP, Vista, and Infinite, 8800 is better.

 

That should get you started. 

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