Barry - the bucket size makes a huge difference. While the PC doesn't see too much gain from it (though not bad all the same), increasing bucket size somehow brings more system resources to attention when rendering. The reason your speed and mine are pretty close is because we both have the same SATA drive bus, and drive access speed looks to be the biggest bottleneck in performance as far as Poser is concerned. If you were to make a RAID 0 setup like Jim described, then I suspect performance would increase by enough for you to blow me and most other machines (PC or Mac) right out of the water. (only problem is, there's only room for two HDD's in the box... and I don't much feel like stuffing another 80GB drive in the one open slot. Then again, I can always toss a spare 200GB ATA 150 drive onto FireWire and call it good :) ) I think from now on I'll just make sure the bucket size is bigger (and I intend to get more RAM while I'm at it. I have 1280 MB of RAM total, or 1.25GB.) bdougal - I only got the beachball when I jacked it up to 512. I ran the renders in this order: 256, 128, 64, 32. I then went back to 512 just for giggles. One thing I'm curious about though, is how much of a performance increase would PC users get if they jacked their bucket sizes up to the larger sizes. /P