Before I forget -- I think I was mistaken about the motherboard; the one at NewEgg was the Asus single-CPU Opteron board based on the nForce3Pro. That one was $299. Anyway... I honestly don't know how to get access to the bios on a Vaio. I was just thinking of my Vaio -- which is a laptop. :-/ Anyway... it sounds like we have some conflicting information here. We have one report that indicates that Vue is multithreaded, and another that says that it cannot use HyperThreading... which implies that it is not multi- threaded. Try rendering the same scene on both machines, and see what you get for rendertimes; what you're seeing is not what you think. When HT is enabled, the OS reports to the user that it has 2 CPUs. So, the task manager shows you two CPUs. If the application that is running is only using one thread, then it will only use one of the virtual CPUs, so it will show you 50% usage. You would see exactly the same thing if you had a dual CPU (w/o HyperThreading) setup, and ran one single-threaded application on it. Without HyperThreading, a 2.6 GHz P4 is not actually going to be 2.5x faster than a 900 MHz Athlon. The relative clock rates are not directly comparable, because of the difference between the two architectures. It SHOULD be considerably faster, though. Give it a try, and see if it's true. Also check your virtual memory settings, and monitor your memory usage... and, being a Vaio, check to see if there's any pre-installed stuff eating up compute cycles (most vendors these days include stuff that is supposed to make your life easier, but has the side effect of wasting processor time).