Hey all...thanks to Ornlu's recommendations among others, got my Radeon 9600 Pro installed along with my new CPU fan and power supply. All of which went in without too many hitches...just had to take the motherboard all the way out of my case (larger case too, Antec) because the heatsink/fan is so big I couldn't squeeze my hands in there to latch it. Everything is running great though, thankfully. Soon I'll be getting started on a new Bryce project I hope. Been running low on time to do images and post messages. :( If anyone's interested, check out the new Renderosity Magazine and surf over to the Online Content section. :) It's a first go-around, but has some nice goodies on it. The December edition should be even better! If you have gotten the magazine, let us know how you like everything! For December, I'm going to try to angle a couple tutorials/free stuff towards the way of Bryce. So be ready, I may be asking around for some contributors! ;) More on that in the upcoming weeks. I suppose that's all for now, just felt the urge to post to say hey and whatever else while I'm bored here at work. I'll leave the links below for anyone interested in doing hardware research. I know the video card is rating very high with Half-Life 2 benchmarks, and Valve even stated it's beating out the nVidia 5900 Ultra pretty handly. Give it a good look! :) Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600 Pro AGP Video Card: http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=320714 Thermaltake Volcano 11 Xaser Edition CPU Fan/Heat Sink http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=370436 Turbo Link Power Supply (made by Channel Well who also makes PS's for Antec) http://www.buyxtremegear.com/turlin420wat.html Enjoy and have a good day! MD :)

very nice. now remember, with great power comes great responsibility. MD

AHHHHHHHH...hey didn't I trademare "MD"? hehe ;) I know what you mean Drac...I'm appreciating this computer finally that it can handle better games and be able to process video faster. My old vid card was a workhorse Diamond Stealth III S540 DirectX 6 card. Of course, enjoy it for now, I prob won't have power for 2 weeks soon if this hurricane keeps making it's way towards us here in Wilmington. Ugh...pack it up for safety. :) BRING IT ON ISABEL! MD

Good luck in this coming hurricane season MadDog! The weather is getting crazier all over the world.

Thanks Dan...yeah, it sure is crazy everywhere. The Pacific seems to be pretty darn busy too. I think Isabel came from the stuff left over from Fabian. We're all keeping track of it. It's kinda exciting to be honest....been through tornados, but not a hurricane yet. MD

Well Maddog isn't the only one to get upgraded. My son fixed me up with a 2.2ghz Celeron, a 64mb graphic card, 512mb ram, all with onboard lan card and 4 x usb 2ports. Nice new case too.... Jeez, but it's fast. Did a 4 minute test render in 40seconds....

I think Maryland got MD trademarked 1st..;) Sure, almost every picture I've made for the last year has a homebrew model (3ds or dxf), so if you need any, let me know..;)