I just put together a new system. ASUS333 board for $79, an athlon 2200 for around $200, 1 gig of ram, new case with power supply and fan. All for around $500 total including misc parts. Just add a video card, hard drive and OS. The asus board already has a sound drive. You do need an ethernet card since they didn't put one on the board but it comes with USB out the wasoo. I've been running XP and P5 and P4 on it for the last 2 weeks with no problems. Its fast plus the new 2200 is a different dye set so the chip is actually cooler than the 1800. I think internally the chip runs at 2.2 gig and externally its 1.8 gig. I would also highly recommend buying the removable drive bays for your hard drives, especially any drive past your boot drive. The drive bays are cheap and allow you to pull out a drive and slap a new one in. I have a boot drive, CD rom and two removable drive bays allows me to have poser on one removeable drive and a backup drive for the other removable drive. You can get a Maxtor 80gig drive now for $79 with rebate so drives are cheap now. BTW MadLab II is awesome!! Great work! And the sci fi scenes are outstanding.