Liquid cooling system do work but not as well as you might think, and if you are getting the full cooling system setup, it will eat way into your budget.

I use a Thermaltake Soprano case, it comes with 3 quiet fans and has a lockable door, I also use an FSP 750W powersupply, it is quite quiet and a really good brand so is reliable.

I had lots of problems with Vista 64, mainly codecs, trying to find 64 bit codecs is a nightmare so if you are planning on doing any animation make sure you factor this in. I reverted back to Vista 32 bit. I have 3GB of ram and can load scenes with billions of polys with no problems.

Jon

DA Portfolio - http://jonj1611.daportfolio.com/