Hang on, that's what the bucket size test was for... I get best time at 512 after that it starts using the HD and slows things down..? so I stay with 512.. but its still 50% average CPU usage (was about 50% at bucket 32).  Also I don't hear the HD working very hard, so wouldn't that mean the bottleneck was somewhere else?  I have 2gigs of ddr2 running in duel channel (matched pair) I thought 1 gig per core would have been enough to satisfy a 5400+ X2 Athlon..?

I'm getting confused here, my old system was a 3800+ Athlon with 256mb DDR and it maxed the CPU at bucket size 32... so shouldn't this duel core max out at that too (even if it wasn't very fast at 32 a scoop, it should still have 100% work to do).. or am I missing the point?

Also, there seems to be plenty processor / memory left to do other things... I can play star craft without it being affected.. if all the memory was in use you'd think it would freeze up from time to time.

thanks