thomllama; "OK .. I may have read this wrong but... Forester stated basicly that the HT system isn't seeing a second processor so it's waiting,.. the point of HyperThreading is to make one processer act as 2. the HT aware software shouldn't slow down with HT on, but speed up, if it's working right, which I'm guessing it isn't with VUE" And =there= is the fallacy that Intel has perpetrated with careful marketing jargon. Hyperthreading does no such thing; what it does is permit a second programming thread to run in addition to the main thread. There are parts of the P4 core that were added for this, creating sections of a second pipeline. Other parts of that 'second pipe' are actually the native parts of the first pipe that are indeed sitting idle while waiting for memory or HDD access, or some I/O function to complete. It -sounds- like you get two cores for the price of one...or in other words, something for nothing. You don't. You still only have -one- northbridge. One pool of main memory. One L1 cache. One L2 cache. One southbridge to handle drive access. The two pipelines have to share those resources, and the HT pipe is slave to the main pipe. But the way HT is built, it can be misidentified as dual processors on an OS that is not HT aware. Calls can be made that start a second thread in a P4, but when the main thread demands come in, the second thread is suspended and data shunted into the caches (which gives you your delays, particularly if that second thread is critical in some way. That cached data is protected, so the -efective- size of the caches that the main pipe uses varies, which also can introduce slowdown). In a true SMP system this would never happen; each chip would have its own dedicated northbridge and RAM, and the only real contention would be for southbridge drive access (general I/O requests having so much latency in them as a matter of nature they're essentially irrelevant); each chip would chug along with it's thread, using its system RAM to store the results until it's polling request for common drive access was acknowledged. As nahie pointed out, VuePro is HT aware; Vue4 is only MP aware (second note to self: proofread before hitting the send button). IMHO, the Athlon 64 is the best chip for Vue, pro or otherwise at the moment, for one reason. The memory controller is part of the CPU, and clocks at the chips speed. The frontside bus is still 800mhz at the moment (DDR 400), but the loss in the latency caused by having to step down the CPU requests to match the motherboard signal speed, then talk to the controller, then feed the data back at that lower speed, is impressive. www.theinquirer.net/?article=17906 This gives a rundown on what's coming in the chip wars, so far as true dual core chips. Note what is said about memory access.