Re the comment about dual cpus not saving much time. Not sure this is quite correct. My duals cut my rendering time down to about one-third of what it is on my husband's machine. His has a slightly faster motherboard bus speed and a slightly faster single cpu, plus a much faster graphics card. Otherwise all our equipment is by the same manufacturers. Only his clock speeds are faster. So the sole difference in our machines is the dual processors (well, I have some ultra fast and wide scsi's and he's stuck with the latest ATA IDE drives.) But I don't try to render on his machine any more. But I agree -renders, especially with reflecting water, which I do a lot of, are time-consuming.