SandmanNinja

good motherboard
nice, stable operating system
good cpu
the more ram the better (but more than 8 gigs is overboard (currently))
good video card

That's the order for me.
If you put a great cpu and ram in a cheap motherboard, you will have poor performance.

If you have a good bunch of hardware but a crappy operating system, what's the point?

If you have a poor/slow cpu, it will render slowly

if you have cheap ram and not much of it, it will give you weird errors when rendering and will force your computer to use virtual memory (which is slow).

A fancy video card is great for games, but you it won't help you render.
On the other hand, having a nice video card will keep your scene nice and speedy when you are working with the model.

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With the generics out of the way, I think the minimum now-a-days is a quad core, 8 gigs of ram, nVidea 8800GT/GTS, and Windows XP64.

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-SandmanNinja
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