[Gdeaver]

A hard drive can have a big effect on animation. Loading large uncompressed video in and out of memory can slow things down. Western digital 10,000 rpm SATA drives are fast. Two in a raid configuration are even nicer. If you do go with Raptors, pay close attention to the power supply and thermal loads. Compressing video is demanding on memory. Spend some money on good memory. Tom's Hardware has some reviews of work station cards. Most work station cards are optimized for openGL. If the programs you use are not OpenGL or a mix, you might want to look at a high end game card and save some money. Don't forget the monitor. Animation is best done on big screens LCD or CRT and they're expensive. What I'm trying to point out is take the money you have and try for a balanced system and don't just focus on the video card.