Most "casual" computer use never stretches the processor to 100% for long. Tapping away in a word processor or browsing the web will probably give you an average processor useage of 1-5%. Poser, on the other hand, uses the processor very intensively. Just moving the mouse around on it's interface will bring the processor useage up to near 100%. Daft! Rendering, of course, will use 100% of the processor slices all the time. As a developer, I often accidentally code endless loops which result in 100% processor use... if I leave this running my machine will overheat (>65C) in about 5 mins. I have a whole bunch of stuff in my case... several large drives, TV card, 3 video cards 500W PSU and the rest. I don't have an overheating problem now! I've taken the side off the PC case!! Lots of lovely air-flow:)) H:)