HP Pavilion

• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-960 quad-core [3.2GHz, 1MB L2 + 8MB shared L3 cache]
• 12GB DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM [4 DIMMs]
• 1.5TB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
• 3GB DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 440 [DVI, HDMI, VGA]

I'm not really looking to game on it, but I am looking to create 3D content and this comes in at around $1000

I do have a question about the power supply though, i chose 460W but there is also a choice for 600W.  The site told me it will inform me if I need the higher power supply, but it didn't so I assume I'm ok...?  I really have no clue what this means.

Thanks for any thoughts!

Wait, are you building your own or pre-built?
*sees HP Pavillion*

If it is a pre-built PC I'm giving you a 5 for picking HP

Why an i7 960 and not a Sandy Bridge for example? None available?

Oh, and the graphics card... the programs you use to make 3D content, don't they use the GPU for 3D acceleration? If they do, you should probably get a beefier GPU... if not you're OK.

The 460 W power supply is more than enough for the specs you showed, given that the GT 440 doesn't use much energy.

See I really don't know a lot about computers (definitely not enough to build my own) so I really don't know what your question means ha.  I sent some specs to a tech savvy (or atleast more than I am) friend of mine and he said it was fine (i5, 8G RAM, Radeon HD 6670).  But I did some digging around and managed to find this for almost exactly the same price.

Looks fine. I'm sure you'll be happy with it. The only reason to get a higher wattage power supply is if you are planing on adding more hardware later, such as SLI video cards. But you can always swap out your power supply in the future if you need to.

I've been building my own computers for a long time and I think it's really worth it. You save a ton of cash and end up with better hardware for it. It's not rocket science, anybody who can read a tutorial and a manual can build their own PC. The only thing you miss out on is tech support.

I usually go with AMD CPUs since they are just as good but cheaper, the 6 Core Phenom II Black Edition is a great deal and fast as a hell. You can usually save even more money on newegg.com in a combo deal with motherboard.

Don't get me wrong, the i7 960 is a quite powerful processor. It's not a huge difference, but the Sandy Bridge series which came out this year is a bit better (i5-2500, i7-2600).

As for the GPU, you really should check out if the 3D software you're using requires/recommends a powerful graphics card, the GT 440 is quite weak but may be enough if your software does not use graphics card acceleration.

Until I can get (a lot) more cash I'm probably going to be using Blender which recommends: Open GL Graphics Card with 768 MB RAM, ATI FireGL or Nvidia Quadro

Eventually (fingers crossed) I will have Maya, which I recently had running on a 2007 laptop that had 2G RAM, so I can only assume it had a pretty crappy video card also.  It didn't run very well but nevertheless it still worked.

Thanks for your thoughts!  Someday I do hope to build my own, but I'm very much new to this and don't feel like screwing up something that expensive at this point in my knowledge

Do you have a friend in real life that can help you build it? You can get so much more for your money if you buy the parts yourself