Hmmm - reports vary. I heard today from an engineer at work that the 64's - or maybe he just meant the new Windows version - was being delayed until past Christmas and that all the retailers were bummed. I don't know anything first-hand. I DID see at Intel's site today that they already have spec sheets up for them but I didn't look. I was busy adding $600 to the price of the pc I want to build/buy by deciding to go for the Pentium Extreme 955 Dual Core.

Jock - I don't know the actual render speeds but Damien and I rendered one of my pix long-distance over the 'net and I can say that a render that looked like it would take my 2.53MHz rig almost 3 weeks (and rising steadily!) took my rig, the four Athlon 2.4GHz plus his "work" pc only approx 70 hours. A pretty big jump. I saw the erratic pixels/second readings that Damien saw during the render. It seemed like the "drone" pc's would amble along for a few minutes at anywhere from 80-300 p/s and then they'd all suddenly jump to 8000-30000p/s for a couple of minutes. Don't know if that was related to web traffic or maybe the way UF might dole out and then receive rendered pixels in a "bucket brigade" fashoin? Just guessing but it sure pulled my irons out of the fire for me and is the reason I want to build a "render farm" of my own. I have this bad habit of picking variables/values that you're probably not supposed to and beating an image over the head with extra layers and masks until it says "uncle" - lol

Rick

Rick