"That is with 2GB, I suspect Macs might make better use of their RAM, if the cross-over point is higher." It prolly has more to do with the way *nix uses memory than with the hardware... Win32 usually doesn't pile on the RAM until it sees a need to, so it takes additional time to initialize and allocate the stuff. In *nix OTOH, as much RAM as possible is already paged and allocated into a pool beforehand, with a little bit left over for emergencies. The RAM is split between "Userland" and Kernel. If a proggie needs more RAM, the OS checks other process demands, then hands over as much Userland-allocated RAM as needed (it'll grab the pages back as soon as periodic system scans show that given pages aren't being used any longer by the proggie.) I haven't tested it with the SATA setup, but I do recall that I used to get some rather fantastic boosts in speed on the PC through FireWire over ATA-100 IDE (prolly because the removable drive has a faster ATA speed as well...) "Drive speeds are possably not that important in this test..." Sorta... on the Mac side of the house, the one big reasons that the PowerMac G5's are getting fairly close results in spite of differences in bus speeds and CPU speeds (and even the amount of RAM) may well have to do with the SATA bus being more or less the same speed for all of us, causing a somewhat consistent bottleneck of sorts. "Next...what about putting Poser.exe and the runtime folder (with the textures, obviously) on a RAM disk?" Shouldn't be hard to do - you could even script it on the Mac (build & init the RAM disk, copy the Poser binary and essential items there, create symbolic links to the Runtime, launch the binary, etc...) but you'd still have to hit up the hard rive for the textures and mesh (unless you have a mentally obscene amount of RAM to stuff your entire Runtime into... my Runtime directory holds 10GB as it is now.) Your best bet would be to kick the CL guys in the teeth once or twice and have them implement a manual memory allocation command or setting, much like a lot of games do now. With this, you can allocate as much RAM as you can spare for the program's exclusive use (example: Quake 3's /seta com_HunkMegs nnn ("nnn"= # of MB's you want to allocate) command.) /P