never had a problem with athlon chips, and abit tech support is great. Asus is infamous for not providing support at all. As far as speeding up poser goes, a processor upgrade makes the most sense, especially when you can pick up a 800 mhz amd thunderbird (note that the thunderbird is a socket A chip, not a slot, and performs much faster, especially in floating point, than the slot A athlon) for under $200 USD.