I'm studying in Japan so I bought a laptop to come here as I had to leave my desktop in the states. It's an HP Pavilion zx5000, 3.0ghz P4, 512mb DDR RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 9200. Granted I just started using Maya recently, but so far I've been very please with its performance. I've never had an error and it runs smoothly until about 100,000 polys on screen. Rendering is pretty quick too. It only cost $1200, so if you've got $3000 you'll do much better ^^