The 64's will be fast but I'm not sure if the latest Photoshop has been written to take advantage of the increased bus width. You see this a lot with games where some new tech, like PCI Express, comes out but then it's a while b4 the games are written to utilize the new capability. All of my old games can't do PCI Express - though my rig doesn't support that anyhow - so you had to wait for new games to come along. I hope I'm wrong but I'm thinking a newer version of PS may have to be released to handle 64 bits at a pop. Or, hopefully, they have anticipated it. Half the answer, though, is RAM, RAM and more RAM - lol.

I can dig where you're coming from, Mindy, though my biggest time problems come from UF4 itself. It seems to have a harder time handling mega-layer stuff than UF3 which sux because that's the only advantage UF has over other fractal programs other than the gradient editing/masking stuff. And don't get me started about the @$%#$^%#^$#$$$$&$^%#$@#@#@#^(($#$$#&&%#$&&(())(&^(^^%$$# bug in the program - that has been supposed to be fixed for the last 2-3 versions - that makes a layer pop a good ways left and up after you let go of it after getting it in the precise spot you want. If you look at the ring around the hole that the large orb is suspended in on my last post, "Spell-binder", you;ll see a nifty shine to the edge on the right side. I'd love to say I meant that but truth is that it came about on about the 50th try of trying to center the ring at something by 768 size. Never got it where I'd wanted it. VERY frustrating but it did turn out neat, I guess.

For the folks who know this stuff - I'm going to put together or buy a new rig soon and have some questions.

Is there any difference/advantage between having a dual-core AMD or a Pentium 4(Prescott?) I'm looking to go just under the max available core speed because I worry about heat dissipation/longevity issues with the very fastest CPU's and with the largest L2 cache and highest front-side bus clock speed.

And I'm planning to put together a "render farm" like Damien's and need to know the drawbacks, if any, to using Celeron processors. Each rig will have 1gb of RAM. I want to use the Celerons because they are much cheaper at 2.5GHz and I'm wanting to buy 4 of them.

C-ya!

Rick