gaz170170: Doing a search on some of the hardware boards, such as Toms Hardware Guide, Anandtech, and for flavor The Inquirer, could probably give you an idea of just how much of a FUBAR things are in the hardware world.... :P Intel's HT is very much an issue of 'marchitecture', or marketing buzzword. It boils down to being a trick that forces a single CPU to run more process threads than it was normally designed for, thus -simulating- a second processor. You have to be running an MP aware OS, not because this magically makes a second CPU appear, but because that type of OS can handle the increased thread load. You also have to have applications that are coded specifically to use HyperThreading before you get more than a few (less that 5%)percent increase in performance. In a lot of ways, it's like SSE-2. That looks really cool when you can run it....but the only app out there that really uses it is a couple of benchmarking programs. 99.999% of the software out there doesn't know what SSE-2 is, and so ignores it (and that is actually one of the pipelines that HT takes advantage of; if an application actually used that pipe, then HT performance would degrade significantly). And what Intel doesn't mention is that no matter what you trick the processor into, it is still only in possession of one L1 cache and one L2 cache. If you trick the chip into running two thread at the same time, then each will need dedicated space in the caches to store instructions and execute simple operations. So at best you have to divide your cache sizes in half; and cache size is one of the bigger variables that can affect how a chip performs. You also have to have a motherboard who's BIOS is enabled for HT before it will activate (HT has actually been in the chips for some time, but Intel didn't tell or release the BIOS updates until it needed something flashy). I would advise sticking with AMD for a few good reasons. Cost, and compatibility. The P4 has something like 5 different socket formats in the market, and none of them are cross compatible. Odds are very good that you would get a P4 board that had little or no ability to use a faster chip. AMD's socket A is used by the whole range of the AthlonDuron chips, and the motherboards are mostly backwards compatible through the whole spectrum (note I said mostly...). As for the renderfarm, it's simple. Connect the NIC cables to the same switch, make sure you -do not- have firewall software active, start a render, activate the HyperVue rendering, and Vue will search the network for any rendercows. I use Win2k Pro and there is no configuring of the OS needed; and none in XP either. The worst you have to do is know the networking name of the computers, in case you have to add them by name. It's the easiest network setup I've ever seen....