Hey Clopper have a look at a Dell Precision 380 they are in your price range and come with the ATI FireGL cards that are recommended by alias (have a look at the Maya qualification charts for more details) so you should'nt have problems with it.

For the price your after i'm not too sure that you will be able to get a PC that will have SLI (the capability to run 2 graphics cards at the same time)????

Pbman - on the Dual channel RAM I forgot theres the DDR2 types of RAM which your friend might be talking about, depending on your system spec you can get 1Gig sticks for it but there not widely available at the moment

Cheers