I'm looking at a new system (has to be a laptop since I travel all the time). How does this processor/vid card combo look? Has anyone run P6 on this vid card? I had an imcompatibility on mine before despite the fact that it was "open GL" capable. AMD Turion(TM) 64 ML-44 (2.4GHz/1MB L2 Cache) 17.0" WSXGA+ BrightView Wide Viewing (1680x1050) 128MB ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/Hypermemory(TM) 1.0GB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB) 160 GB 5400 RPM Dual Hard Drive (80 GB x 2)

The graphics card really doesn't affect P6 other than the preview window; any Open GL card will do. The rest of the setup should handle P6 just fine.

CPU is good. Poser should run fine. The graphics card - well, I had a lot of OpenGL trouble with the ATI consumer cards. You might want to go for nVidia - much better OpenGL support, even on the consumer cards - or an ATI FireGL. Memory is OK. More is better, as always, if you can put 2x1 GB in there your system will be very happy. Those hard drives - can you afford 7200 RPM drives? They're a LOT faster.

Sounds a good system to me, now i've had the opposite experience with video cards that svdl has had, my 2 ATI cards have been fine but my nVidia was causing poser to crash.......BTW is it an HP laptop as i saw one on TV yesterday with the same spec (if memory is correct) and it was a sweet looking machine, lots of nice features...Those screens are lovely too........Steve

Off the top of my head, I believe that the ATI video is actually an integrated chipset and not a stand alone video card. It's not bad as far as integrated graphics go, but pretty much any dedicated video card would be better.

My only trouble with a graphics card came with the upgrade to P6 from P5. My current laptop (also an HP) has an NVIDIA GeForce FX. Unfortunately I doubt I will find a laptop where the GPU is not integrated into the chipset. The issue with P6 was that although NVIDIA had worked out the kinks with efrontier, no one has written a firmware update for this card and no one I've talked to seems to think it's their responsibility. So I'm pretty much stuck with no hardware acceleration on this machine if I want to run P6 (it crashes at boot up otherwise). For other applications I like the NVIDIA brand but because of that little quirk I'm stuck with very slow movements in the preview window. I will probably look into 7200 rpm drives but I didn't see that option on the customization page so it may be a size/power issue on laptops only get back at 5200 rpm. I'm not sure if HP was advertising this computer, but yes it is that brand. It's a zd8000 series. My current laptop has the same screen as this one I've speced out, and yes it is one of the best screens I have ever looked at. It's got such a high pixel density that really high resolution renders look spectacular. So as far as everyone knows that Turion chipset will run poser okay? I'm "downgrading" from a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 HT but as far as I can tell poser doesn't take advantage of hyper threading so I'm hoping to actually see a performance increase from a purely processor standpoint. I'm also not sure that you can compare gigahertz to gigahertz between Intel and AMD.

I am sure you can NOT compare Ghz to Ghz between Intel and AMD. AMD gets much more computing power per Ghz. For instance, the Athlon64 3500+ performs roughly equal to a P4 at 3.5 Ghz, but its actual clock speed is only 2.2 Ghz. So there's a good chance that the Turion will perform as good as that P4 3.2 Ghz. Poser tends to perform better on AMDs than on Intels. Has to do with the long floating point pipelines on the P4. Only a few applications have been optimized for the P4 pipelines (3DS Max for instance), and Poser isn't one of them. You might want to check out IBM. A colleague of mine has an IBM laptop with a fantastic screen, and an ATI FireGL graphics chip with dedicated video memory. And a 7200 RPM disk. A wonderful machine, blazingly fast and very stable.