Quote - Drats! I had a nice, long list of goodies for you and tried to cap it off with a big smiley. Somehow that closed my window.

Quick recap: Get as much memory as you can. Those large rez renders eat memory, as does any amount of massive scene building you care to indure. The extra buffer space never hurts.

I'm an AMD backer myself since my first 350mhz screamer . For the money, you just can't beat them. Their FX 8 core series is top dog right now, though when I built my current rig, the 1090T Black was the fastest CPU. And I whole heartly vouch for watercooling if you're planning on doing the type of renders you spoke about. It's just silly not to get the extra protection for your components and have the peace of mind that you won't have a melt down. With my little office off the back of our house, it gets to around 92* when its 108 outside. With my little window unit blasting, it'll come down to 80 or so, but even with my rig on full load, the CPU has never eclipsed 38C.

On your video card, you'll definitely want to upgrade. I've always liked nvidia, which is also prime with all the GPU-rendering goodies if you go that route eventually. I specifically went with an Asus mobo with SLI to run two of the cheaper GTS450's which were equivalant to the GTX480, and cheaper still by about a c-note. Lux isn't quite there yet, but when they get that mode sorted out, I'll be glad of the extra horsepower.

Anyway, rambling on, you seem technically sorted from your above poke into the monitor. Next time you boot up, check your bios to see what your max temps are safeguarded at. If you're crashing and suspect it's heat, that would be my first check, as well as what Sharky mentioned about your fans. I clean my screens out/off once a month due to dog hair and whatnot that tracks through here. PC Probe can do it realtime as well if you have it.

Have fun with that build, and come visit us in the Reality thread in between!

I'm adding to my official wishlist now.  How about 2  GeForce GTS 450 cards running in SLI with an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard and an AMD FX 8150 processor?  32GB RAM and a solid state drive with windows and maybe VUE and DS installed on it?