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.

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