haven't followed the link (PC Club is my current fave as well, so I daren't lest I start drooling and never return). CPU speed is important. Aside from the other system performance based issues , cpu speed determines the speed at which rendering will occur. Faster = bestest Motherboard/CPU pairing will be a decision based on experience and success. In 21 years of working with these, ahem, things, I've never known two people to feel the same about anything in specific -- only in general. Inclusive of myself, lol. 3DNow has been around since the K6 days. And is in every AMD chip. It's primary purpose is to serve the same role as the similar instruction sets in the intel chips. Poser is a 32 bit application. Until a 64 bit comes along, it won't do any better on the 64 bit versions or the 32 bit versions. XP (any version) or 2000 are the best choices (PC) for OS. Linux might be if the users of it would stop proclaiming the death of MS long enough to make that a reality and get something that works better and is easier to use. (snicker -- peng's gonna hurt me!) Poser does not make use of any hardware capability in video systems as of poser version 5. 6 may be another story, but I'm personally against it and don't expect that to be the case. So unless you are playing games or using a hardware enabled program, a nice simple card will do. Say, 128MB of video ram just cause. The hard drive is important becuase while the system is calcualting allt he things during a render, it stores information in your swap file. Go to RDNA and do a search int he P5 forum there for my "Five Things" tute (also at PPros) for reasons behind that. As for using a RAMdrive -- yeah, you could, but you'd have to write your own program so that it could pull the data out of the main fork and dissassociate it witht he orignal program so that you aren't caught up in the ongoing limit of 32 bit OS systems : the 2GB per application limit. That is, once you get above 2GB in memory usage, it's over. Whether that's ram or swapfile or both in tandem, that's the ceiling. And it is possible -- look at what Adobe does with Photoshop's scratch disks, for example. Poser doesn't even wait for windows to adjust the swapfile, though -- it wants it all now. So such a program would be pretty handy to have. as far as 7 goes -- those things are all of the above. Asin, what you are describing is overall performance -- and for overall performance, the entirety of the system comes into play. So all of them. I'm off to buy groceries. Good luck!

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)