In all of this fuss about personal favorites, and ``this is UNIX, you
don't need a fast CPU'', I think that a cardinal point has been forgotten:

 What will *you* (Hussain Ali) be using this machine for?  Software
 development?  Games?  Multimedia?  A ray-tracing rendering box?
 Design and visualization?  A file server in a large network? ...

E.g., if you're doing a lot of ray-tracing, then raw CPU power may be the
primary concern, even though you're *not* using MS-WINDOWS.  (Hence
suggestions to worry about IO speed may not apply.)

Speaking for myself, I'm very happy with an Athlon tower, using a VIA
chipset.  There are some minor problems I have with the auvia sound
support---if I were using this machine primarily for audio purposes, I
would call the problems very serious.

Since you spoke of 3D support, I assume that you have either games or
modeling as a significant concern...  I can't comment much on current
hardware particulars, but have two general observations about video:

 * The monitor can be chosen pretty much independantly of NetBSD.  Unless
   you're just looking for general hardware advice, the question won't
   get you much, here.  (^&

 * 3D hardware acceleration is essentially non-existant at this point.
   If you really want/need it, check out the boards supported by the
   VERSION OF the Mesa-glx package in pkgsrc.  (I think that the
   project is now going by the name ``Utah'' to distinguish it from
   Mesa.)  It supports some boards---but I think that the NetBSD
   package lags the ``live'' project by a ways.

   As an alternative, you could wait for (or help) DRI to be supported
   by NetBSD.  Or you could be planning on using the hardware-accelerated
   3D under some *other* OS, and just want something that works with
   NetBSD (check the drivers for XFree86, then---but probably most things
   should just work).

   (DRI == Direct Rendering Infrastructure.  Designed for XFree86, it
   has been implemented under GNU/LINUX and now also FreeBSD.  It
   provides a more direct path for graphics to get onto the display, as
   I understand it---while also providing hooks for hardware-accelerated
   3D graphics.  I don't know of anyone currently working on that for
   NetBSD.)


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu