I've put together the following as a system which I believe offers very good bang for the buck while staying within our corporate "buy Dell" policy and a $2000 budget. Please look this over and offer any suggestions you may have - we will also be getting a system for my co-worker in a couple of weeks and if there's room for improvement, we'd like to take advantage of it. Also, I am particularly interested if we are better off with the DDR versus RDRAM. Everything I read suggests that while the RDRAM is faster, it has latency issues which keep it from performing as well as DDR. Thanks for your help! Base Unit: Dimension 4400,Pentium 4 Processor at 2.0AGHz (461-5357) Memory: 512MB DDR SDRAM at 266MHz (311-1325) Keyboard: Dell Enhanced Quiet Key Keyboard (310-2753) Monitor: 21 In. (19.8 In. Viewable, .24AG)P1130 Trinitron Monitor (461-3250) Video Card: 64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce3 TI 200 Graphics Card with DVI (320-0252) Hard Drive: 40GB ATA-100 7200 RPM (340-3588) Floppy Disk Drive: 3.5in Floppy Drive (340-1927) Operating System: Dell Application Back-up CD, Factory Install (313-7222) Operating System: MS Windows 2000 Professional (420-0297) Mouse: Mouse W/Wheel,1.3A, Microsoft,Dimension,MG, Factory Install (310-2757) NIC: 10/100 PCI Fast Ethernet NIC Factory Install (430-5353) Modem: No modem requested for Dell Dimension (313-3607) CD-ROM or DVD-ROM Drive: 24x/10x/40x CD-RW Drive (313-0727)

I wanted to add some specifics on the video options: 1)64MB NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 4X AGP Graphics Card with TV-Out 2)64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 Graphics Card with DVI [add $80] 3)64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 Graphics Card with DVI and TV-Out [add $200] Thanks again for your feedback!

I finally get to replace my '97 Pentium II 400!! Looking for recommendations on video card, bus, memory configurations. Will be running Windows 2000. Primary objective is reliability (current machine crashes when generating toolpaths), with performance as a secondary objective. Our corporate policies restrict me to a Dell (no AMD) and under $2000. If you happen to be familiar with Dell's options, so much the better! Thanks in advance for your input.