i have an athlon64. yeah, the 64-bit feature set is - at the moment - still in the hype phase. but thats exactly what they said about MMX, SSE, etc when they were first released, and they made a huge difference. but 64-bit aside, in a purely 32 bit environment athlon64's are still very powerful systems. once those 64 bit features are utilized (with longhorn, more product support, etc) itll make a much larger difference and theyll leave everything else behind. as for the the memory issue.. you wont be using 16 gigs of memory for a long, long time, so dont let that influence a buying decision. even with athlon 64 boards, most users are using a gig of memory because of the single sided/dual sided issue with dual channel DDR, and how scarce single sided chips are. also, with the athlon64 you have an on-die memory controller so your memory is runnning at the same speed as your CPU as opposed to being limited by the FSB, so its a nice advantage. my main system right now is: athlon 64 3000 (1800mhz, overclocked to 2400) 1 gig corsair value RAM (with a64s its pretty pointless to get expensive RAM, although adding RAMsinks is always a good idea) radeon 9700 pro (overclocked a wee bit) SB Audigy 2 a pair of hitachi deskstar SATA drives i wont be upgrading for a long time. ironically my secondary 'rendering' machine is pretty much identical to your system. xp 2000+, gig of ram, 64mb geforce2 GTS, and i dont run into any problems with it. if you are using poser5, then the graphics card - unless its something incredibly slow like an old trident - has absolutely nothing to do with it. even the most pitiful of modern cards can keep up with just about any 2D graphical processing you throw at it, and 3D processing power only comes into play when you are running something like OpenGL, Direct3D, etc. Poser5 has a basic software driven workspace, not OpenGL hardware like P6 (although i really fail to see any huge difference between the two in terms of appearance, other than the gridlines). something else just came to mind: its high summer, so try checking up on your cooling. perhaps your vid card cooling fan died, or one of your case fans, etc.. could be causing some lockups there.