Hi, I wonder if anyone can advise me on the best path to go down. I have a pIII 1ghz cup with 64mb graphics card,1gig of sdram 133hz, using WinXP Pro. My question is...what would I need to upgrade to get in order to get the fastet resonse. ie upgrade to 3ghz P4 - or upgrade the graohics card to an ATI (128mb) or something along that line. I also use Brye 5 & Vue4 so would like to new the best option for all 3 products. Its mainly to moveing around before rendering -but also so render times. I am also in to animating. Could anyone please point me in the right direction Many thanks, Bushy

What has the most influence on the speed of a car? A 3 liter turbo engine instead of a 1 liter fuel injection engine or new tires, exhaust, brakes, shocks, etc?

Well you have plenty of RAM so I would suggest faster CPU. A graphics card will improve your working the scene but not the actual render, and it sounds fine anyway. Definately looks like the CPU will be the bottleneck. I run 1.2gHz and its not too bad.

Definitely a chip upgrade. Although this would essentially mean a motherboardcpumemory upgrade, as a P4 would require you to shift over to DDR ram (you may want to check into a fast Athlon, as well). The graphics card -should- be sufficient for VueBryce levels of on the fly rendering.

i would suggest picking up a amd 64 instead of the p4 3ghz since u dont seem to upgrade very often the amd 64 cpu will provide u with alot better long time value and performance aswell. if possible wait for the new mobos that will make sure u get a nice upgrade path aswell if you would feel u need even more speed.

Well like everyone else has already stated, a new CPU is in order here. But keep in mind that you want to have a system with a fast bus speed too. The P4 3.x Ghz cpu uses a 800mhz bus. That is pretty quick. I am not sure what the AMD chipset uses. Also, for best performance and compatibility, stick to the Intel chipsets. I believe the 865 has the 800Mhz bus speed. If you are leaning toward the AMD 64bit, you might want to see how it performs with your 32bit apps. Some 64 bit CPU's actually run 32bit code slower then a comparable 32bit cpu. I don't think that is the case with the AMD, but you want to get some benchmark comparisons with the apps you us if possible. Regards, Paul

Heh. Personally, I would recommend an Athlon 64, either the 2800 or the 3000. They are relatively cheap (for new processors), there is a good assortment of motherboards to be had with some wild features (the one I'm using is a Gigabyte K8-VNXP, which has 2 SATA channels, a IDE RAID array on the motherboard in addition to the standard IDE...so I can run up to 10 drives on the thing without adding any 3rd party controller cards). The only 64 bit chip in the non-Mac world that has any trouble with 32 bit code is the Intel Itanium...which uses a custom codeset, and requires and emulator to even run 32 bit apps and OS's. And the emulator eats at least 50% of your processor's ability. Vue and VuePro flies on an Athlon 64. P5 is faster loading. No issues in any of them related to the chip or chipset that I have discovered. And Win2kPro runs like a champ on it, as well... And the days of the Intel compatibility mythos are pretty much that; myth. Once that was true a few years ago, but since AMD went their own design route, instead of cloning Intel, that issue is no more. Now it boils down to a matter of whether an app has been coded to the accepted standard, or whether it has been slanted towards one of the tweaks of the code base. There are a few apps that do perform marginally better on Intel; those tend to be the very high end graphics programs, and the video editting suites...all of whom have been specifically optimized for Intel's SSE-SSE2 code additions. In all other arenas, AMD either holds its own, or is slightly better....and is a less expensive part, generally.

hehhehehe soo basicly everyone here is telling you that you're in need of a new computer! If you're not into building.. just save your pennies and go out and buy one, don't bother screwing with the one you got. you have plenty of ram, you have a decent video card, the processor (and mother board) are basicly your bottleneck and to replace them you need to replace everything else (basicly) you can get a noticable boost by just going to any major manufacturer and buying a new one, even in the low end (you can go to Dell, Gatway, Sony, etc) if you hang onto your monitor you can get a mid end from them too for under $500. One other thing to think of.. getting a referb... some people don't trust.. so do... but think of this, most companies have extended warr.'s.. if you can get a reberb with say a 3 yr warr. for $200 less.. you end up with a better machine (you can bump up the processor speed for same $$$).. a longer lasting machine (3 yrs warr instead of 1yr with some having only a 90 day labor warr), and finally, referbs they have fixed what is wrong as long as you get if refeb'ed by the manufacturer.. not a 3rd party!! It only costs the Manufacturer money if they sell it again and it's still bad right? so you're usually safe (90% of the time) anyway.. just thoughts.. I'll go now :)