Uuummm... Don't get so wrapped up in glitz that you get hung up on the Megahertz/Gigahertz mythos. Raw CPU clockspeed only has so much affect. There are quite a few other points. First, have 8 cores on a board doesn't guarantee a thing; the more cores you have fighting over the same system ram and cache space, the more latency you are going to get in your processes. Second, keep in mind that the quad core (actually a dual dual core) that Intel just released is pretty much a rush job to beat AMD. It is new tech, and there may be issues with it that don't show until the stress is applied. Third, the throttle on the Rendercow isn't the CPU; it's the memory and the hard drive access. Fourth, you want to minimize the investment in renderboxes; overclocking, watercooling, all that is just wasted money that could be better spent elsewhere. Here's my current rendergarden: 4 of the boxes are Athlon 64 3000+'s (3 socket 939, one socket 754), an Athlon 64-3200+, and two Athlon XP 1900's. All with at least a gig of RAM and 20 to 80 gigs of HDD. And having built it all, starting with Vue 4 and an old Athlon 700 slot A, I kinda know a few things. The socket 754 is able to keep up with the socket 939 chips, despite only having the one memory controller. There may be some miniscule difference, but so far as frame rendering time, equal or on occasion slightly faster that its bigger brothers. The s-754 has a gig of DDR-266, the s939's have DDR-400, so there is more than enough memory bandwidth from the slower ram to handle the Cow's function. That leaves hard drive access. The fastest box in the stack is the topmost of the rackmount cases on the bottom of the cart. That's the 64-3200+. But neither that, nor the fact its a Soltek board, has anything to do with that. Of all the boxes, that is the only one with a RAID array. As a test I got a couple of 40gig SATA's from Newegg and made a simple RAID 0 array (no need for redundancy, as there is nothing but the OS and render appliances installed). That one can go from cold to XP desktop in less than 25 seconds; the progress bar on the XP splash screen may make one trip across before going to the desktop. The Cow does a lot of diskswapping, as textures and scene data gets loaded there when a render starts, so the Cow is not needing a constant datafeed of resource info. You can start a garden pretty cheaply now. For example, go to newegg.com and look up the following: Asus A8V-VM. A micro-ATX AMD board with integrated video and support for the X2 chips. $54 Athlon 64 3200+ socket 939 (that socket is being discontinued in favor of the AM2, so they are getting cheap) $62 1 gig (2x512) Kingston Valueram $100 or so. 2 Western Digital 80gig SATA-3.0 drives OEM $88 total for the RAID 0 array. Put an ATX 2.0 300-350 watt power supply and a cheapy case around all that, and you have a killer of a renderbox (just make sure =NOT= to install anything like audio drivers; they will slow things down. A lot) that is not gulping amperage, running compartively cool, and getting the job done. That is all you need. Oh, I use AMD for many reasons, but in this case it is because the tech is mature; it has proven itself in the real world. Intel's offerings simply don't have the age rings to prove they are better technology.