NewEgg is still having its Black Friday sale for the rest of this evening, and you can get a lot of great stuff.

I just bought a combo with two MSI N450GTS Cyclone cards. These are NVidia chipsets and are fairly inexpensive. They are about $130 per card. My main computer has an NVidia GeForce 480 GTX which is nice, but I'm not using its full power at the moment.

I also have an i7-950 quad-core processor and 12 gig RAM for this computer (this is just going to be a Linux box for use with Blender and LuxRender and such) and not my Poser box.

I know that LuxRender is supposed to be going towards using graphics cards (GPUs) for increased speed and most of the other 3d packages are at least making noises that way with some progress.

It all depends on your budget. I would definately recommend a 64-bit OS (Windows 7 is working fine for me on my main machine), and at least 6 gigabytes of RAM.

Another thing to consider is portability. If you need to travel with your computer you need a small system or a laptop. And powerful laptops are expensive. I should have thought about that before ordering my system, because I could have gotten a Shuttle barebones system - their upper end now can use the more powerful i-7 processors and are very small.

Good luck!

D. Jay Newman

A little learning is a dangerous thing.