Okay, here's the scenario: I have unlimited funds and want to biuld a computer that will allow me to make full and complete use of all posers facilities with maximum speed. What would that machine be?

Something with an fast processor & enough RAM to choke a horse.

lol- unlimited money- think "workstations"

Hehe, I was hoping for more specific details :op I already have 2 gig of ddr ram, my motherboard is only an amd xp2400. I have trouble as most of us do rendering more than about 4 figures (millenium3) and was wondering if there is a machine that could enable me to do 5 or 6 figures. I know there are ways of faking it, but if possible I would prefer just to render in one shot. Is this a limit of poser or would a super machine sort it.

Actually- and i'm sure a lot of tech heads will correct me- But I think that some how- chips with the math coprocessors right on the chip have a lot more problems then some of the older systems. I only run a 636 celeron with 256k ram and win2kpro. But I have no problems running any poser scene. No matter how many characters, other then speed ofcourse. ----------- lol- think machines in nanoseconds instead of mhz :)

I have an Athlon 64, 3400+ chip, InVidia G-Force FX 5900XT, 1.5 GB Ram, Western Digital 72GB SATA C drive, 2 Maxtor 250GB SATA D-E drives, running XPpro... Kicks major butt with Poser Pro-Pack and Vue 4 renders! Startup times in just seconds, average renders in under 60 seconds (your mileage will vary obviously depending upon scenes). I will REALLY need this horsepower once I upgrade to the new Vue 5 with GI, HDRI, Radiosity, etc. (But I was planning on that). Got the machine from CompUSA and have been very happy with all of it from day one.

The "Perfect Poser Machine",uh?! The answer is quite simple, it doesn't exist nor will ever exist... Trying to be more constructive I can tell You what I've got and what it's capable of with Poser. Processor is Intel P4 S478 UP 3.00 GHz, DDR RAM is 2 GB and Video Card is a Creative 3DB FX5200. First of all remember that,no matter what someone's still saying, Poser (4, PP and 5) has no use for the PC's video card - it's at least odd for a graphic-oriented program, but so it is - hence no need for that ultra-sophisticated stuff in very colourful boxes (unless You're into games...), there is NO WAY that could help Poser to work or speeding it up. I'd suggest You to go for the processor (more power and more speed You can get...) and, even more important, for large amounts of RAM memory (I'd say the most important factor in preventing the too frequent Poser's crash/freezings, and in allowing to render complex scenes). Whit the above configuration the most complex scenes I manage to render in acceptable times are composed by .pz3 files of about 150/200 MB,with 5 Mill figures undressed/scantly dressed or 3 Mill figures fully dressed, High res (up to 4000 x 4000) maps, and a lot of high/good resolution props. With shadows turned "off" these scenes render in about 40-60 seconds,that increase dramatically with shadows "on". Speaking of Poser, nothing grants You that what succeded happily on,say, Monday, will do the same on,say, Thursday. But that's the real Poser trademark: whatever you'll do to fix it or prevent it from crashing it will EVER manage to find something new to get stuck in the middle of your best ever render!!! A last word about P5...I read a lot of posts saying it's way better than P4 and definitely worth the upgrade...My experience goes definitely to the opposite: whatever the improvements are P5 is terribly slower than P4PP in everything, 20 to 30 times slower in rendering actually,not to speak of posing characters and other amenities... Hope it helped, and good luck... Alberto

Thanks guys, especially pizzone. geogress: I am assuming you're using Poser4, becuase if you are using poser5 you have more luck than any poser5 user I know. For you to say you can render any scene defires believe, in poser 5 anyway. Mizreal: wtf are you talking about? First of all the graphics card has vey little to do with it and secondly my machine has no relevance to the question. I was asking what would be the ideal machine, not what is wrong with mine! I am prepared to invest money in building a powerful machine if it enables me to render scenes in poser 5 with 5 to 6 millenium 3 figures, fully clothed. If it is not possible to do this no matter how powerful my machine, I wont bother. That in essence is all I wanted to know.

I use p5 and PP- P5 actually works a bit better- slower sometimes- but better.

youo want the Athalon 64bit processor and as much ram as you can stuff into the case. The 64 bit version of XP is NOT worth the price so save your money on that, just get a good 32 bit OS. AMD has the processor tricked out to act as two 32 bit processors (IE Pentium 4!) and they scream! DDR RAM is pretty much standard. Again, Mo Ram = Mo Betta! Windows XP is really odd when you try and use multiple hard drives regardless of thier size. the executeable files MUST reside on the boot drive (you can name the drive to any letter you want with XP). I personally really like ATI video cards, but others will argue with me on that. Last I went shopping, you could up to 128Megs onboard the video card. I've heard that you can get more now, that's a very good thing! :) hope that helps some. Or if you really wanna go nuts.... go get a customer true dual processor machine with two 4.8Ghz Pentium4 processors, about a Gig and a half of RAM, go with a full RAID setup and mirrored VINCA back up (an identical machine of course), and a plasma 43 inch widescreen for your monitor. If that dont put a dent in yer budget.... D@MN!

don't raid, it'll slow you down. Get a 10k rpm raptor and put you windows page file on it.

Nice one, that's pretty much what i was after :o) I already have my main drive mirrored on a raid (learnt my lesson the hard way)LOL. Just before I go, im your opinion will these enhancements increase the amount of dressed millenium figures I can render in one scene or just increase the speed at which it renders? Thanks Marv

As far as I know, just increasing the processor speed doesn't help. I've got two machines that I regularly use for P5, one's an Athlon 2700 XP with 1 Gb of (Kingston) DDR333 RAM and an ATA100 2x80 Gb hardware RAID 0 unit, the other is a P4 2.8 HTT FSB800 with 1.5 Gb DDR400 Dual Channel and a 160 Gb ATA133 disk. Often scenes that crash on the P4 system will render fine with exactly the same settings on the Athlon. Speeds are comparable. My impression is that P5 runs slightly better (as in more stable) on Athlon systems than on P4 systems. So I'd advise an Athlon64 system, dual channel DDR400 ram (at least 1 Gb), and an array of 4 SATA150 drives arranged as RAID 0+1 (Highpoint hardware RAID controller). Then you have both speed and data redundancy. Graphics cards: my Athlon system uses a Geforce Ti4200, my P4 system has an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro. Video performance for Poser is comparable (the Radeon is MUCH better for games though). The ATI card requires more system processes for its drivers than the Geforce card. My third system has a simple RivaTNT2 card with 32 Mb of RAM, and that one is definitely slower than the Ti4200 and the Radeon 9600.

Don't go too crazy. I don't think Poser can take advantage of a dual processor machine. But don't ask me for more detail, I read that somewhere. :/ I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. Definately go Athlon64. I can't wait to get mine, I've heard nothing but good things about those chips.

You're right, Poser doesn't take advantage of a dual processor machine. If you run hyperthreading on a P4, it will only use half of the processor capacity. I checked, stability with HTT enabled is exactly the same as with HTT disabled, speed with HTT disabled is significantly higher. But the main advantage of a dual processor /HTT /Athlon64 system is that you can do something else when Poser is rendering! As for memory, the PowerMac G5 systems have the advantage of being able to use much more memory per process (currently it's 8 Gb, Windows can only allocate 2 Gb to a process). As of right now, the PowerMac (or Linux on an Athlon64, but you can't run Poser on Linux) has the edge on Windows systems.