Graphic card is responsible for viewport speeds, i have the same, Geforce 8600gt and it's not that bad, it slows down on 1m polys give or take 100k, but that can be easily fixed simply by hiding objects that you don't need to see as you work, or simply setting them to be displayed as boxes.
2 Gb of ram should be enough for rendering, but i do recomend buying 2gb more, ram is cheap today. Cpu is adequate, if you can i would also recommend upgrading to quad core, intel Q6600 is good and not that expensive, i have it, and i'm quite pleased with it's performance,also worth mentioning, original speed is 2.4ghz but i overclocked mine to work on 3.2ghz.

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

I would echo the recommendation for a quad-core. The Intel Q6600 is probably the best buy if you plan/would consider overclocking. Otherwise the PhenomII cpu's from AMD are also very good - IIRC they have the best price-to-performance at the moment.

Of course if you want raw speed then the Intel I7s cannot be beat right now.

For a GPU the best buy in the middle to upper range would be the 4850 or 4870 series from AMD-ATi. Price to performance they are the best, plus they should be getting a price drop with the 4890 series having just been released.

I personally have a PhenomII 920 CPU and a 4870 graphics card and the system rocks no matter what I've thrown at it.

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Following your maxim of leaving no INVENTORY uncluttered, you receive +1 NIKON D90

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Thanks for the input. I already thought about hiding the parts I don´t need right now, but what when my project is finished? I´m working on only one leg of a robot and got these problems. What when I have two legs, two arms, a body and the head. And what, when I start posing him... Then I´ll get Stop Motion, in the true meaning of speaking -.- So, there has something to change.

It seems I could put everything on the list, Graficcard, Cpu and Ram... I will keep your advice in mind

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I use a machine with even less grunt than that at work and its totally fine with even quite heavy scenes. I have geforce 7800 card similar processor and 2gb of ram. at home I have a much faster machine but I dont really notice that much difference until I create some pretty heavy scenes or when I'm rendering my quad at home can churn out frames way quicker. When you work with turbosmooth you need to optimise things quite a bit. have them turned off in the viewport etc.. Maybe you need to have your viewports rendering with direct x.

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I always collapse turbosmooth down to the object, I think it makes things easier when I am still modifying it. If you have one of the forerunners of my Graficcard and better condition anyways, may it´s just the processor I need to replace... mmh.. I´m unsure. I looked at the 9500 GT with 1024 MB Ram and 550 MHz, the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 (I couldn´t find the Q6600 on conrad electronics) with 4x 2,3 GHz and 2x 2048 Level2 Cache and 2 GB more Ram (would make a total of 4 Ram). I once thought it would be enough, now rather ask

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Don't let nVidia's naming scheme fool you. The 7800 is a much better card than the 8600. I would also recommend staying away from the 9500 unless you seriously cannot afford anything more.

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Following your maxim of leaving no INVENTORY uncluttered, you receive +1 NIKON D90

Download DAFNOT now! [Link to www.digitalartsfront.com]

nah nah nah, don't collapse it, really, never, it adds all that geometry to your object and leaves you with no way to optimize. As Tyson said there's enough options available on turbosmooth and meshsmooth to optimize viewport speeds, so collapsing them is not so good idea.

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

Alright, good to know. Thanks

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