Opera; Here's a condensation of what I've found over the years to date: 1)As of P6, the L2 cache performance mattered with Poser because it was a single threaded app. With the multithreading of at least some of Poser 7, (and AMD's hypertransport bus system (which intel is apparently in the process of copying)) easing the speed issues, it -may- not have as much relevance. 2)A lot of memory is only useful if the OS, and through it the app, can access it. A 32 bit program can still only address 2 gigs of physical ram per operation. They can do things like page flipping to sorta kinda trick things into using more physical ram, but you still have that 2 gig limit at any one time. 3) The current bottleneck in the rendering pipeline is not CPU or RAM; its HDD. Even if its just calls to the OS, hard drive access times are the new hurdle. In the rendergarden I have, I ran a test and found that the socket 754 Athlon 64-3000 with a gig of DDR-266 performs within a second/frame render time of the socket 939 Athlon 64 3000+ with a gig of DDR-400. If it were CPU makes all, the s939 would have been kicking the snot out of the s754, since the older chip only has the one memory controller, as opposed to the dual controller of the newer chip. If the memory bandwidth was the issue, then the DDR-400 should have been turning out over 40% faster times. Of the renderboxes, the one that is fastest is an Athlon 64 3200+; and that one is the closest to the X2 main system, and the only technical difference is that I put 2 SATA 3.0 drives on the 3200+ in a RAID 0 array. (I also currently have the parts on order to place a similar RAID array on one of the s939 systems, which should enable that testbed to exceed the s754's performance). ** The test scene was a 900 frame Poser anim with dynamic hair, so their were a lot of floating point calcs going on** -IF- you can fit all your scene and shadowmaps and resources and whatnot into ram, then the HDD issues become a lot less critical once things are loaded. But any access of the swapfile or temp files really slows the process down. If you want to use the quad core Athlon 64 in the future, then either get the AM2 socket (according the AMD the quads will slip right in there), or wait until the AM3 comes out, which will use DDR-3 memory.