Athlons draw more power and run hotter than Pentiums, so reliability is dependent on good cooling. Motherboards for AMD have also been less reliable than the intel boards, and often do not include on-board sound, video etc. The overall cost of a system for business use is comparable. Games machines need a high-end (fast) video card, so the on-board video is no benefit, and so AMD is a better bet there. For Poser, you don't get anything from accelerated video, since rendering is done by the main processor, not the DSP, only the final display uses that. I'd choose the AMD if you're going to use the machine to play on, and Pentium if you're using it to work on.