for my next PC I will look for 2 things - as much RAM as possible (...whcih might still be 2 GIG) and a powerful CPU. for the graphics card thing - I used to work with an old ATI, and well it somehow survived maya. got me a nVidia 6800GT some weeks/months? after it came out. never had problems with it. at my old office we had a quadro FX 4500 - a very not cheap graca! in my current company, I don´t know what´s in..

and I tell you what. graphic cards really don´t matter in my opinion as long as you can plug 2 monitors into it.. no matter where I worked and with what high end components, my 1,5 year old homemade comp with 2 Gigs Ram, 6800GT and amd 3200+ is still as fast as the company stuff.

cause all that matters is CPU and RAM. and as long as apps are limited to 2 Gigs of RAM it wont get any noticably better (don´t speaking about CPU here), not to say that I can still buy my own processor Unit at the nearly same price from 2 years ago. I don´t want to sound pessimistic, just say - get you a small and real fast harddisc and use the first partition as pagefile - in case you use windows..