Funny this thread topic came up as I had just ordered a P4 3.0 prescott system and it arrived today. I have two older athlon machines, a 2100+ with 1 gig 133 ram and a 2400+ with 768 meg DDR 266 ram. The new P4 3.0ghz system has 1 gig DDR 400 ram. I loaded Vue Pro (I only have Pro, not regular) onto the machines to test. I didn't run the test on the 2100+ because I was working on something else, but I use it for network rendering. I was rendering the "Amazon" sample scene found on the first disc of the Vue Pro 3 disc set. I updated all Vue installations to the latest beta before trying this. I also tried rendering on the P4 machine with hyperthreading on and off. Here are the results (rendering 640x480, broadcast quality) AMD 2400+: 24'25" P4 Hyperthreading: 22'35" P4 No Hyperthreading: 30'42" So obviously Vue Pro uses hyperthreading. But the alarming thing is how close the AMD 2400+ and P4 HT are in render times! This is absurd! The AMD machine is at least 2 years old, maybe older! And it barely loses out to a brand new P4 3.0 ghz processor!?!!? This really sucks. I had a hard time deciding between the P4 3.0ghz prescott and the AMD XP 3200+. I chose the P4 because on most benchmarks you can find on the internet, the P4 wins soundly (at least over the AMD XP 3200+). Now I wish I had gone with the 3200+. I went with the P4 because of the hyperthreading (which e-on specifically states Vue Pro supports, and obviously it does) and the SSE2 and SSE3 instructions, but it seems that it doesn't make a bit of difference vs. AMD processors. The AMD system would have been $20 cheaper too... So then I set the machines up to network render. Luckily it does seem that the P4 is doing a little better here. It's hard to tell but it seems it's rendering faster on my network with my homemade scenes (not vue demo scenes). Maybe the Amazon scene is a bad test scene, I'm not sure. I guess I'll have to do some more tests but right now it doesn't look good for my new P4...