My "new" (actually 6 month old) computer has a E8400 dual core, ASUS P5K-SE mainboard, 8GB of RAM, nVidia 9500GT with 1GB of ram and Vista Home Pro 64. I bought it in a shop in which you select the items and pay a few bucks for the assembly and it costed me 800 Euros.

Vue really flies on it and I never experienced any memory related problems (e.g., if I tried on 1GB +XP32 box to use Vue terrains + displacement materials I got a crash within 15/20 seconds).

Even if you use 32 bit applications, 64 bit OS + a truckload of RAM are good: e.g., on my box I could give 2GB of RAM (the maximum normally accessible to a 32 bit app) to 3 different applications, having still 2GB for Vista and other applications. There are moments in which I have Vue 7 Infinite + Carrara 7 + TG 2 + World Machine 2 + L3DT + GeoControl 1 + Firefox + Notepad++ + Visual C# 2008 open and the systems feels "unloaded": try this setup with a 32 bit box...

W.r.t. to polygon count: instancing weights almost nothing (it could be just little more than a 3D transformation matrix) while actual different meshes do make a difference. Poser figures are not so heavy (about 70K polygons); you might try a 3D Coat / ZBrush multi million polygon meshes for something "serious". If you get a 3D graphics book, you will see that there are lots of algorithms and data structures which handle meshes / scenes in logarithmic time so a 1 million poly mesh is just twice the job of a 1000 poly one w.r.t. to computations. On the other hand, try putting 2 1 poly mirrors one in front of the other, with an 6 poly cube between them, and use radiosity... how many multiple reflections do you get? with what render times?

In general, when you can choose, always spend money on memory and not on the CPU (which is exactly the opposite of what prebuild boxes do).

Bye!!!

GIMP 2.7.4, Inkscape 0.48, Genetica 3.6 Basic, FilterForge 3 Professional, Blender 2.61, SketchUp 8, PoserPro 2012, Vue 10 Infinite, World Machine 2.3, GeoControl 2