In my experience, AMD beats Intel when it comes to Poser rendering. Since Poser isn't compiled with the long P4 pipelines in mind, a P3 architecture like AMDs tends to perform better. 3D Studio Max has P4 optimized DLLs, it may be that 3DS Max performs better on an Intel than on an AMD. Rendering usually uses floating point math. An Athlon64 certainly is faster than a P4. I've got an Athlon64 3500+, MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum, 4 GB DDR400 Dual CHannel, and it's about 1.5 times as fast rendering as my AthlonXP2700+ /1 GB DDR 333, and that Athlon2700+ is just a fraction faster than my P4 2.8 HTT/1.5 GB DDR400 Dual Channel. So I'd recommend going Athlon64. A S939 mainboard also has the option to replace the CPU with a dual core Athlon64 when they are released, a simple BIOS upgrade will suffice. The size of the L2 cache seems to be quite important. An Athlon64 FX with 1 MB L2 cache outperforms an Athlon64 with 512 KB L2 cache, even if the latter is running at higher clock speeds. As far as I can see, going for an Athlon64 3200+ S939 is a good idea. Maybe even a lower speed, 3000+. Then you can upgrade to dual core without losing too much money (or you can wait, but I expect the first batch of dual core Athlon64's to be quite expensive. I'm going to wait for a couple of months after they're released before upgrading). Hope this helps, Steven.

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