Hi,

Wonder if anone can give me any advise on upgradeto 64bit in terms of processor, motherboard & graphics card. As I do not wont to waste money on a processor that cost more than others - but will not make much, if any difference when using Vue 6inf 64bit.

No point speaking to PC World ect...as they are of no help.

Many thanks,

Bushy

Your problem is in the OS. Windows Vista 64 bit is not yet supported well (many drivers still in beta). Windows XP 64 bit is hard to get nowadays (support has been stable but limited).
Virtually all processors are 64 bit and all other hardware supports this.
As always in 3D graphics, you will need to buy the fastest processor you can afford and with a 64 bit OS you need to buy a motherboard that can support a huge amount of RAM (8 Gbytes minimum) and put a reasonable amount of RAM on it to begin with.

I agree, and if you are to add a graphics card you will want one that supports DX10 for the future, 8800 or higher and perhaps the fastest SLI you can get. 

Driver support and 64 bit app support is scarce.  I run Vista x64, and most utilities are 32 bit and do not support the x64 platform.   However, x64 will also run most x86 or 32 bit graphic software.  So with the correct hardware setup, completely based on the Vista x64 platform, everything compatible, you can make the OS perform. 

Do your research before you buy and make sure everything is supportive of Vista x64.  Even if you do not like Vista x64, you can always fall back to WinXp x64 or any of the x86 platforms with good supportive hardware.

With Vista Ultimate, and Virtual PC you can run other OS's within the main OS, which gives you another option.

Thanks for your comments - I forgott to mention that I have already purchased Winxp pro 64bit.

Wondered if you could suggest which motherboard would be best as I thought all boards only hold x4 memory slots - are you also able to suggest a graphics card that will work well with vue6 inf? At the moment I have an ATI RADEON 9600

Thanks,

Bushy

Look at Tyan for the MB. My machine is 16 months old, yet has a board with 8 slots for 16 GB ram. I don't know what to suggest  in the area of graphics cards, tho... I seem to have rotten luck there.

The 9600 is outdated and will not fit the newer AGP or SLI card slots, which have different wattages different bus speeds that can cause unnecessary wait states and hick-ups when using older cards.

Motherboards are usually a matter of personal preference, as some like Gigabyte, others Asus, and still others Intel. Intel based boards are the most supported, but Microsoft is trying to change that with the partnership of AMD and ATI. Soon AMD will put a chipset on ATI video cards so that they will be compatible with DX10.  

NewEgg, TigerDirct are good sources of boards and cards, or combo's. If you choose a motherboard, you want a 24 Pin ACPI Power supply, a board that can handle the extra wattage for a video card, which is usually 300 watts per card or more. Do not under power a motherboard with duel CPUs and Video Cards. A Duo Core 2.6 or better is nice, but very expensive, a Pentium D 3 gig is good. The quad cores are not yet supported in a way that Vue can take full advantage. Yes look for a board that can handle 4 gigs of memory or more. The more memory you can install the bigger the scenes and the quicker the render. Get DDRII memory with low latency PC5300 or better. Above all else make sure the board is fully compatible with the x64 platform, and especially if you are to use Vista.

Remember the CPUs do the processing not the video card. The video card simply takes the rendering engines info and posts to the screen. A couple of SATA 300 gig drives are nice.

Currently if you are to run a video card with a little muscle, you will have to have an ATI x1650 or X1950, and for Nvidia any cards above 7800 should work well with XP, Vista, and Infinite, 8800 is better.

That should get you started.