Well, here is my two cents 1DanK. From what I know right now, there is no reason to even think about 16GB of RAM. No current OS can support more than 3GB, and even that is not recommended for the non-techie. I know what you mean about the 1GB situation though. I remember back around 1998 saying that when 1Ghz CPUs were released that would be the last computer I would ever have to buy, well, 20/20 hindsight says I was way off the mark! The 64 bit CPUs are a novelty to me. I don't see any use for the average user for at least 2 or 3 years. They are being super-hyped by Intel, simply because AMD beat them to the punch. Server software will be built for the 64bit generation in the near future, but for your desktop, don't count on it. By dual-core, I assume you mean the whole hyperthreading thing? I haven't had the opportunity to test that, but I have heard that some people are getting a noticable boost in performance for graphic intensive apps, especially games. IMHO, it's another hype machine. All hyperthreading does is use more of the CPU's clock cycles to process data. I have always wanted to test to see if 2 CPUs on a board would be significantly faster, even with both at a slower speed, than the same speed CPU with hyperthreading enabled. My theory would be that the two pipelines could process data faster than the single. Fast hard drives are going to help a lot with Poser. It seems Poser loves to abuse the virtual memory of a system. Being able to write back and forth to a drive faster is of course going to help that process. However, not sure why RAID configs would be necessary. RAID is more a technology for servers, since its main purpose is to have the same data in 2 places simultaneously. My suggestion is to get high speed IDE drives. I forget what the current acronym is at the moment, but I think it is SATA. Basically, if you can afford them, get the 10k RPM disks, with the largest cache size you can afford. (I think I saw a 120GB 10k 8MB cache drive in CompUSA's circular last week for around $120.) I hope some of this helps!