Hardware suggestions for newbie

[233jim]

I am just beginning my sketchup journey as I work through Site Design for sketchup and am finishing an online course. My current computer is not cutting it and I need to upgrade. It is a 10 year old HP with an Athlon 64 3500 processor and about 2 gb ram.

I intend to do landscape designs with lots of vegetation and also get into rendering them perhaps for others also. I would like to take this as a skill set to help me find a job doing landscape design as well as possibly offering this on the side to other landscape designers/contractors.

I will be going through Rendering for sketchup book next. The long and short is I want a computer that can render as well as handle sketch up models, but of course I don't have much to spend and am just a cheap stake at heart anyways. I will also be doing photoshop cs5 and some autocad 2012 work with it (2d only).

Is it possible to build a good system capable of creating pro quality renderings for cheap? I think maybe I could pick up a dell xps 8700($700) and put a Evga gt 660 card ($150?) in it and have a decent machine? Are there any other systems that I could get cheap around the holidays and add a deal priced holiday graphics card to? If so what system and what cards should I be looking for?

I could also get a dell business outlet workstation like a precision t1700 or other models, but then we get into Xeon processors and quadro cards and I don't know how to compare these to the consumer grade stuff.

Any help welcome.

Thanks a lot!