Very well put tjohn that is exactly what happens. A good motherboard, a fast CPU, and loads of ram. I've got 1Gb DDR ram and 1.8GHz Athlon CPU which I'm going to upgrade to 2.2GHz soon, this initially made a great improvement in render times but it still took 1 & 1/2 days to render this months challenge entry which came in at a staggering 500Mb Br5 file. So the more you got the more you use. Catlin