Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1403770

Hi FiveEyedFish, Since you are talkin' 'bout a dream machine, here is mine (with reasons!):

CPU: AMD 4400+ X2 (2 cores, 1MB cache per core. Costs a bit over half the price of the 4800+ X2. OK - so I really want the 4800+ but I'm not a fool. The 4400+ seems to be quite over-clockable if you get good cooling) - Although Poser only has a single process thread and there is currently no real advantage going to 64 bit (at least for Poser), the fact that you have a second CPU core to do some of the other OS processes is going to help things a bit and should make your system very smooth. Also when you are rendering you want to be doing other stuff too - like looking for Poser Freebies?!? It might be that an AMD FX57 actually goes faster but I know which I would prefer. I am not excluding Intel here. The lower spec intel dual cores are actually cheaper than AMD but most test results favour the AMD processors.

MEMORY: Make sure you have at least 2GB and watch out for the dual channel thing. The Motherboard needs to support dual channel DDR (pc3200 or better rated) and you need matched pairs of memory sticks. Low latencies (i.e. high quality branded stuff like Corsair TwinX) are also going to help a little but you will pay a premium for this. You seem to be able to get better latencies on 512 MB sticks than you do on 1 GB sticks - so probably you could get 4 x 512MB but with only 4 slots per motherboard your future memory upgrade options are limited to completely replacing pairs of memory sticks.

MOTHERBOARD: Any suitable Socket 939. I personally like ASUS but you really need to check the specs and see if a particular Mobo has all the features you want, e.g. SATAII, RAID, 4 slots of Dual DDR.

GRAPHICS: Nvidia 7800GTX. This will give lovely interactive pose rendering (in Poser 6) (and great game play if you play games!) but will not help your final rendering (or Poser 5 downwards) at all. Any modern video card that supports OpenGL is likely to be more than adequate for a Poser PC. Nvidia 6600 and above will probably be absolutely fine.

HARD DISK: The solution to speed here is to use striped RAID. Rather than going for a single huge Hard Disk, I recommend two smaller ones. Multiple hard disks pretend to be one very fast hard disk. The seek times are the same as for a single disk but the data throughput roughly doubles. SATA is better than IDE (PATA) and SATAII is better than SATA. Try to get NCQ (native command queueing) too since it is likely to add a bit more "go faster". Ideally you would have 4 Hard Disks for two RAID arrays. Put the OS on a small RAID array (say 120 GB total) and install applications and Poser stuff on a large one (say 300 GB+).

MONITOR: A big one. 19" to 22" CRTs are now quite cheap if you have the desk space.

OS: WinXP Pro. If you are going to go for Win XP 64 bit version you need to be very careful about all of the components because they MUST have 64 bit drivers and not all manufacturers are rushing to write 64 bit drivers. MS has compatibility lists but it is worth checking your chosen product support sites to make sure that 64 bit drivers can be downloaded NOW.

I got all excited just listing the stuff, so I will have to start saving up now.

My poor old system (P4 3.2GHz, GeForce FX5600, non-RAID, 2GB RAM) just seems so slow now.

Regards Jovial.

When you do finally get your dream PC can you please run Jim Burtons Benchmark (see linked thread) performance test render and report the results. Thanx.