Aye, Drawbridge I don't know what you're running, but ALL of my computers are faster than a Cray... It's 2003, my friend! It's often faster to run a couple of radials instead of softshadows, at least if you're Premium Rendering. And when possible, set the lights to Ranged falloff, it takes the least Rendergy. But on some kinds of renders, of course, you NEED crazy lights. At times when impatience kicks in, grab an old Pentium-2 or AMD K6-2, those things are still good for rendering. You can leave 'em running for weeks, and it's a good thing too, because that's how long your renders will take! But it leaves your main rig free to design on. Finally got my personal Benchmark scene down to 35:32. AMD 2500XP+ running at 1.5, 512 DDR, Radeon 8500AIWDV, although the graphics card doesn't do anything in this case! So for my test benchmark to render in real time (realtime = 60fps, in my book), the projection so far calls for a 15GHz processor, RAM amount in this case makes no difference. I just clocked it up to 1.8, and I'm off to run my benchmark again!