Well, I shut hyperthreading off, and render times increased by 20 minutes! What's going on here? I think the problem may be with Vue. The only other program that I've tested so far on the new machine is Photoshop, and everything was indeed faster there, with the exception of two processes (who's complications I believe were graphics card related). As I mentioned in my first message, I'm using Vue 4 v4.20-02, build 265846. Are there any newer updates for Vue? Perhaps Vue doesn't know how to effectively communicate with the newer 875P chipset and/or Prescott architecture. No matter how "off" the settings could be on the system (and I don't think anything is amiss), there's no way in hell that a machine with a 3.2 gig chip and 1 meg L2 cache running on an 800 FSB, using 2 gigs of 400 FSB dual channel ram is going to slug along as slow as a system running on a 2.1 gig chip with a 256 meg L2 cache and a 266 meg FSB being fed from 1 gig of 133 meg ram! During this week, I will perform some additional rendering tests with Blender, Maya, and combustion to see how the system fares overall. I hope the problem is indeed with Vue, otherwise I'm going to really regret building this P4 system! Something in the back of my mind kept telling me to build another Athlon system, and I now wonder why I didn't.