Regarding the 3D graphics; if he is into doing pre-rendered 3D animation and stuff, the graphics card doesn't have to be extremely juicy: Blender (arguably the best tool for the use case you described) uses OpenGL for the interface of the program and the viewports, but the actual rendering process for the final image/animation does not use a graphics card at all. CPU and memory for that. As for 2D art, for vector drawing, Inkscape isn't bad, and if you don't have a problem with using partially proprietary software; Xara Xtreme is available for GNU/Linux (the program itself is under the GPL, but the rendering engine is under a proprietary license of some description). As for graphics tablets; most if not all the Wacom tablets are supported by X and programs like The Gimp. They have a fairly wide range of models available to suit needs/prices. Never really looked into support for other tablets, Wacom seem by far the most common. For the hardware, an Intel Core 2 Duo system is probably the best choice, probably look at the 2.66GHz clock speeds. Past that, and for quad core systems the prices go up a lot, and you honestly wouldn't see a huge performance increase except in heavy duty ray-tracing jobs (but that could be distributed to his old P4 if performance was really critical. Which it normally isn't). As Glen suggested, I went onto Ascent and with a little modification, a fairly reasonably system can be priced out to about $1800, including a 17" LCD monitor and 6" by 9" Wacom graphics tablet. -- Sam Douglas