i feel mac pro is the way to go (hey, i'm a poet and i didn't know it!) (beginning to sound like a dr seuss book now)

I expect i will go that way - i have an old ibook G4 i can sell for about £300 to help out.

I'm thinking i'm going to go for the single chip xeon though. I do mostly modelling (environmnet and set design) so i don't really need the polygon crushing power that say a character animator needs. Also don't need more than 2GB RAM for that at this stage do i? As i do more and more work i might be bumping up to 6GB or so.