from what ive experianced in maya and gaming the NVIDIA video cards are awsome...if you do alot of gaming then thay are great beacase the openGL abitities and 3d rendering and built in atianalising...for maya they are also great beacase if u do hardware rendering it can render any scene in about 5 seconds

i used to have a 400mhz system runing maya and some 3d games that laged abit even with the lowest graphics settings, but then i got a new NVIDIA video card and the performance of my system (3d wise) was atleast 10 times better maya ran way faster and all my games ran exelent on high graphics

about the dual processor that can boost rendering dramaticly beacase it alow maya to render two differant parts a a scene at the same time and mutitasking doesn't ever slow down the system(unless u have 40 maya windows open or something0

and geting 2 gigs af ram is alittle overkill unless u plan to have that computer for mor than 5 years

well good luck
hope my info was pointless