Check the apps being benched, though, Dave. -All- of them are coded for SSE-2 and many for Hyperthreading. Poser in any flavor uses neither of these, just straight old fashioned X86-32 code, and AMD's processor pipeline is one -hell- of a lot shorter than Intel's is, nowadays. That's one of the reasons they can turn in eqivalent performance clocking only at 70% of the Intel chips clock speed. And don't toss off the Athlon 64 just yet. You can get an Athlon 64-3000+ for under or at $200 at Newegg, and the motherboards are in season. Socket 754 may be limited, but there is planned support through a 4100+ version, so there is -some- upgrade path. And the speed increase you get from the HyperTransport data pipes on the motherboard, and the memory controller on the CPU, are niiiiiiiiiiiiice...... Not to mention you can get a mobo loaded with the amenities.