Eegads 1700!!  I get most of my parts from eBay sellers or Newegg which usually has slightly lower prices on some components.  I've been to the UK a couple of times.  I agree, the prices for computer hardware over there is on average, quite a bit higher than in the US.  Although almost everything else seems to be a bit less expensive.  Well, it you don't include Gasoline (petrol) prices that is...

Quote - > Quote - I have been building PCs for almost 20 years, and my first advice is don't buy a name brand machine.  I am forever seeing folks by these and regret it later when they decide to upgrade.  They generally use lower quality (flavor of the month) parts.  They are in most cases, very proprietary meaning you get locked into buying from the manufacturer in order to do any upgrades, and you don't have much control over what goes into them,

Building a custom rig, or buying one prebuilt from a local shop means getting a better machine with better components and quite often, for less money than a name brand.

That being said, here is what I put together for my latest box, which was designed specifically for 3D modeling.

AMD Phenom II X4 (quad core) 955 (3.2Ghz) Black Box Edition (CPU is pre-unlocked to make it easy to overclock if you want to.)  MSI 790FX-GD70 Motherboard (The best on the market as far as I'm concerned.)  8GB Corsair PC1333 RAM.  XFX ATI Radeon HD 4870X2 (dual core) PCIE 2GB Video card with DVI and HDMI (with adapter).  Antec 1200 Full Tower Case (It's large to fit more drives in. I have noticed that 3D content fills up drives pretty quickly.)  Creative Labs X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro Series sound card.  Kingwin 1000 watt modular power supply (you need a big one to handle the video card and multiple drives.)  Seven Seagate Barracuda SATA II Hard Drives 1TB each.  LG DVDRW with Blue Ray reading.

It flies on all of my 3D apps.  And it only set me back just about $1K

Quote - My old PC (AMD X2 388 plus GeForce 7600GS) is dying and I need to get a new one.
I was just about to go and get a Intel Core2Quad 8300 based PC with an ATi Radeon 4830 but I've been seeing a lot of Dell Precision 600 dual Xeon based machines for a bit more. They all tend to have old 128mb Quadro FX1100 / 1400 cards though.
I currently have a bunch of problems on C6 where I can't display texture & lighting properly in the Assemble window regardless of how I set the program up. I keep having to render to see what things actually look like!. Would this be remedied by a better card?
Also, which machine would be suited to faster rendering etc? Can a 5 year old Xeon machine be faster than a modern one?

How important is it to have a high end graphics card, can someone recommend a widely recognised  'good one'?

I also use CS3 products a lot.

Can anyone please help?

Well, I don't know where you buy your stuff, but over here in the UK that little list will set you back nearly £1700 (I just priced it all) !

That's a little more than $1000!