yes i would say that hard drive speed is more important than video card in a dev machine, presuming that you are not using cad of course. but you also have to consider cache on the chip, bus speed, ram speed... in every case bigger is better but the cost vs results vary. i would choose chip speed with cache and bus speed over the others as the other can be expanded easily enough but changing motherboard or processor is a bigger deal and also costs a lot more.
Slán
~M

>Does anyone have any recommendations to make on building your own computer? I came across an article at:
>
>http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1549122,00.asp
>
>on how to build your own gaming machine for under $1,000. What I would like to do is build my own machine, but I'll be using it to develop with Windows XP Professional, Visual Studio.NET, and SQL Server 2000. I am assuming that in a development machine, hard drive performance is more important than graphics performance, but is that true?