Cheers guys It has crossed my mind about the usage of other packages like Houdini, I tend to sit on one side of the fence on on the fence sometimes until I have better info or understanding of what I am looking at. I now have a better understanding thank to you lot. As per SAS drives I have already found a couple of motherboards with built in SCSI/SAS controllers, and if I go for one without a controller I'll most likely go for an Adaptec or a Promise card. But that said any other suggestions would nice. With that said I like the idea of a couple of SAS drives for working with, and larger slower SATA RAID for storage. On the CPU front I think it is now between Xeon & Opteron (2nd Gen). I've used an Xeon powered MacPro and HP server before so roughly know what I am going to get. But I don't want to discount the Opteron which could prove to be the better option, on price per performance level. I have no experience of the AMD chip so I don't know what to expect from it. I will however appreciate any views or comments on the Opteron. By the way I am thinking of a dual processor machine. As far as the GeForce cards modded to a Quadro, I understand the warranty issues, it just sounded like a nice idea, worth thought. When I said the mod is done on windows I forgot I could probably do it on Linux too. And just for the Architect I got the gist... just Anyway, again thanks for the help guys Cheers Chris