Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2077843

nakamuram. RE: Poser render Speed >>Benchmarks done by Anandtech and Storage Review indicate that there is no "real-world" gain in performance.<< This cannot have been a Poser-specific test. Poser has it's own strategy, which must be respected. I have been involved in several threads that delved deeply into this including runs of the Poser-specific Jim Burton benchmark (see link attached), and here is my general conclusion (Poser6 not explored for this conclusion): No matter how much RAM you have, Poser 'thrashes the swap file' and loads textures from the drive. There is no such thing as sending a Poser pz3 off to render and have completely silent (except for the tiny tiny moment it actually writes the tiny tiny render file to disk) hard drive during render. Once agin, if I am wrong about this, please teach myself and many others who would be very happy how to force Poser to stay in RAM during render when enough RAM is present. Therefore, to get great render times, you have to have blazing Hard Disk management. First, the disks themselves must be fast, at least SATA and preferably the 10,000 RPM Raptors. Next, you have to manage the 'five elements' with regard to HDspeed: OS, OSSwapFile, Poser.exe, RuntimeFolder, Pz3. If you have one modest harddrive and everything is on this drive, you are condeming your renders to slowdown. The first line of attack would be to at least to defrag and partition that drive and move the swapfile to its own partition. But you still can only do one read/write at a time. The HOME or hobbyist setup? Get your RAM to 1G or 1.5G, then if you have only one HD to your name, anywhere, consider investing in a low-cost second small SATA drive. The next level of strategy is to place different parts of the five elements on different Hard Drives. I do not claim to know the ultimate best way to do this, or what amounts to overkill, etc.; I am still experimenting. Maybe the most radical approach would be five separate drives with dedicated controllers. Solid state (RAM hardware drive) is way radical, but interesting. At any rate, one strategy is to RAID-0 two Raptors. You get blazing individual HD speed, plus the software makes your 'where should I put this' decisions for you. Simple, fast, efficient. These drives cost about $130 eash. Several of my poser mentors have gone this way, as have I. slvd and I have nearly identical rigs, and our Jim Burton P5 benchmark stands at 158. That is a great time. Please also see post 12 by nerd above. Although this thread asked about 'best CPU' we have answered that but also supplied deeper information to the original poster (and others researching in the future) about the critical necessity for fast HD in Poser. ::::: Opera :::::