Something I left out earlier but which I think you could learn from - when you mentioned Vue and the demos on their site, I felt I had to go have a look in case they got something new to show:
I spotted a drop down from the menus strip that was something like showcase/gallery/examples and the sub item called "spotlights". If you look at that page they show 4 _finished_ film/tv items, and two of those projects were completed as a "result" of using Lightwave. I suspect they could have been made "inspite" of using anything with "max" in it's name. There's a very hard lesson there for you to observe! ;O)
As for your hardware I use Intel as they still, so far, tell you what speed it runs at in it's name, AMD may be right and it may not matter what the number is to the rest of the world, but it does tend to matter if you render stuff. I can get by on my second machine with 1.8 Ghz, if yours does come close to that then it may well do you a good service for this sort of work while you are learning. I don't know what speed any given AMD CPU actually runs at, but I'd imagine you will. Your GFX card is nicely over the top. The ram is not adequate. 1Gb minimum, 2Gb for comfort, 4Gb if you want to get silly about it! ;O) At it's present level it will often slow you down without you noticeing; to a greater or lesser extent depending on the OS involved.
I spotted a drop down from the menus strip that was something like showcase/gallery/examples and the sub item called "spotlights". If you look at that page they show 4 _finished_ film/tv items, and two of those projects were completed as a "result" of using Lightwave. I suspect they could have been made "inspite" of using anything with "max" in it's name. There's a very hard lesson there for you to observe! ;O)
As for your hardware I use Intel as they still, so far, tell you what speed it runs at in it's name, AMD may be right and it may not matter what the number is to the rest of the world, but it does tend to matter if you render stuff. I can get by on my second machine with 1.8 Ghz, if yours does come close to that then it may well do you a good service for this sort of work while you are learning. I don't know what speed any given AMD CPU actually runs at, but I'd imagine you will. Your GFX card is nicely over the top. The ram is not adequate. 1Gb minimum, 2Gb for comfort, 4Gb if you want to get silly about it! ;O) At it's present level it will often slow you down without you noticeing; to a greater or lesser extent depending on the OS involved.