SATA drives have the =potential= to throughly blow the current PATA drives out of the water.... but the technology is still in version 1.0 (literally 4 days after SATA became an offical standard, they were waxing rhapsodic about the speed you'll get with the upcoming SATA II specification). On some operations, like the loading of a lot of sequential data, like a huge texture, a SATA drive does exceed the throughput speed of of a parallel drive; in a random access job, the PATA drive is just as good, or better. At the moment (this is like when they came out with the UltraDMA specification; at the very beginning, people saw no real difference in performance over the old PIO mode 4 drives, either.) As to something in the BIOS. I would wager a bit that what was done is that Hyperthreading was turned -OFF-. Intel's Hyperthreading isn't all they want you to think it is. It allows the processor to run more than one process thread at a time, and that is about it. It does this by utilizing pipelines in the CPU that aren't being used at that time (like the MMX pipe, for a quick example). It doesn't magically make your system think it's a dual processor system, and to get any real benefit out of it, your application has to be coded to take advantage of it. With current software, Hyperthreading can actually hurt your system's performance, as the processor is wasting cycles trying to do something that is utterly unneccesary. Poser is a bute force application. P4 uses a scanline renderer; this uses CPU and memory, the more you have the better it runs. So those numbers look about right. Vue is a bit more complex, so throughput time from your system memory and the swap file come into play. And one caveat to keep in mind, the days of 'Double the clockspeed, Double the performance!' are over, and have been for several months. The Athlon's have been hanging in against P4's that are clocked 600mhz to 1ghz faster. -How- a chip was designed is what matters now, and real world applications are the only way to judge the results. Benchmarks are too easy to rig against one or the other. Poser isn't a multithreaded application to my knowledge. Vue is. In your BIOS, there should be a single line something like 'Intel Hyperthreading' and across from it the word ENABLE. Just highlight it, and use the up down arrows (or page up-page down, depending on who made the BIOS), and toggle it to DISABLED. Then save the change, let the system boot, and run the Vue test again.