Well, as to the CPU...since you want it to last you a long time your best bet is probably to just jump in the deep end and go buy a well-priced AMD64. That will run Gentoo just fine and quite speedy from what I have read.
For the graphics card...Hmm. Well if you don't mind proprietary driver support, you should probably get a higher-end nVidia GeForce 6x00 card, since nVidia's drivers seem to support this quite nicely. If you want to have full F/OSS drivers for your video card, I would recommend buying the best card you can find which uses a Radeon 9200 or Radeon 9250 chip. You should *not* get the SE or LE versions if you can afford it, since those are stripped-down versions of the 9200 and 9250 chips with half the data bandwidth (64-bit vs. 128-bit) and a slower-clocked GPU (200 vs 250 MHz) and/or less video RAM (64 vs. 128 vs. 256 MB). My Radeon 9200 seems to run Composite just fine, for what it's worth.
You'll probably also want to get as much RAM as you can afford and as your motherboard will hold.
Just my two (three?) cents... -- () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign - against HTML Email, /\ vCards, and proprietary formats. --------------------------------------------------- Peter A. Gordon (codergeek42) E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG Public Key ID: 0x109DBECE GPG Key Fingerprint (SHA1): E485 E2F7 11CE F9B2 E3D9 C95D 208F B732 109D BECE Encrypted and/or Signed correspondence preffered. GPG Public Key available upon request or from pgp.mit.edu's public key server. ---------------------------------------------------
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