I was interested in getting the Intel i7 with the DDR3 memory. with 64 bit Vista.
will there will be any problems with matching up with Poser 7, Vue 7xtream, and Cinema. It is just out, doing

I know there are computer wiz's here that might be able to give me some input, outher than the fact that it is so new.

Well, Poser (unless there have been some recent changes ) is a 32-bit program. You had to modify some things to get it to see over 3 gig of memory, as I recall.

It will probably run slightly faster, but I'm not sure how noticeable it would be. Stand by for more helpful answers....

From what I here it should be faster than a x2 Quad Vista 64 bit. I should have mentioned that I came with 3 gigs of ram, which I plan on bringing up to 6 gigs of ram

Also, I hadn't mentioned this but I will then have to computers, what I will do is Animate in Poser on my older 32 bit machine and then import my Poser files into Cinema by way of InterPoser, that way I won't have to worry about campatibility problems.

I think your right about the x32 bit with Poser unless you get Poser Pro. I was wanting to place everything dealing with animation on my hi end computer. but I don't want to spend the extra money for Poser Pro, when I can import into Cinema with what I will have available. thanks, I will see what you find out.

 Remember, just the renderer is enhanced; the rest of Poser Pro is still 32 bit, single threaded. It's only going to see 2 gigs of address space, regardless of what you do. I haven't had issues yet with Vista Ultimate 64 and any of the Poser's from 6 on up, or Vue Infinite 7.

Poser 7 can use up to 4 GB on a 64 bit OS. 

Great I have Poser 7.
I was also questioning about the new intel i7 with the DDR3 memory. Sometimes when you switch up there becomes new problems.
I am wanting to go to either a Quad x2 machine, or the new Intel i7. I heard it is very good, but very good isn't good if it doen't work with the programs your are working with.
I would ask (I keep refering to it as efrontier) but to get an answer from them is a slow process sometimes.
I want to get my computer updated correctly so I can work on things that will get me some faster renders. "Doesn't everyone!!!" LOL

While the i7 series has great performance, it's also quite expensive. So are mainboards that can hold the i7, and so is DDR3 - still more expensive per GB than DDR2.

The Q6600 is getting (relatively) old, but its price/performance ratio is excellent. I'd think an i7 based machine would perform maybe 20% faster than a Q6600 machine, at triple the price.

thanks for the Info. I'm building my machine from the ground up. And my computer wiz was wanting to get some info about compatability with Poser 7, Cinema, and Vue & along with the Adobe studio Bundle.
I doubt there would be any issues with the Adobe Studio Bundle, but the other programs per Company, are not as numerous as Adobe I'm sure, and are more apt to have issues. Thanks  I will relay this to him, I may go with your suggestion as everyone loves save money.

My next biggest  consern is how flexable is your suggested Q6600 is so that I can get when needed to have all the cores for strickly rendering. I can do my animating on my other machine while the other one renders. I here bits and pieces about all the cores  working like that there is a trick or something to do that. This My partner will know how to do, but experience in this field is always welcome.

*"... to have all the cores for strictly rendering..."
*That's not up to the CPU, that's up to the application. IF the application can make use of multple cores, THEN they will be used. You might have to tweak some application settings - for example, Poser 7 uses only 1 thread (=1 core) by default, you can change that in preferences to 4.
Vue: it depends on the version. I have Infinite, and it'll grab all cores it can find, along with all memory that it can find. A quad core with 8 GB of RAM gets used fully by Vue Infinite.
I'm not sure about the lighter versions of Vue. For example, Vue 6 Easel is only 32 bit (won't use more than 2 GB), and probably won't use more than 1, maybe 2 cores.

Cinema is considered to be a midlevel to high end app, so it'll probably use all the hardware it can find. I don't have Cinema, so I just don't know.

I have Poser 7, but at first I'm only going to make my animations within Poser then import them by way of Interposer into Cinema and render there. I also have Vue 7 xtream which will also be imported into Cinema. I'm not worried that can't handle Cinema the 4 cores.
If I go with the Q6600 then I will get 8 Gigs of DDR2 ram

You should have no problems regardless of the hardware configuration you ultimately decide on. The only thing you have to do is tell Poser to "Render in a Separate Process" and increase the number of threads to match the number of cores your CPU has. Though Poser 7 doesn't officially support Vista because it was released prior to Vista, it will work fine in Vista x64 and will take advantage of multiple cores. However, the Firefly render engine in Poser 7 is still 32-bit and can only address up to 4GB of memory as a result. Poser Pro 7.0.3 is the first version to take advantage of 64-bit architecture. Not only can it address more than 4GB of memory, it also makes use of 64-bit instructions and will render faster as a result. Oddly enough though, the main Poser executable (even in Poser Pro) is still single threaded and doesn't run any faster on multicore systems, so always uses the "Render as Separate Process" setting or you won't benefit from having a multicore processor.

That is good information. But I will not be rendering in Poser 7. Just animating and importing it to Cinema, as it is a whole lot faster at rendering than Poser or Vue.
Reguardess of that fact, this is very good information as The guy that is building my Computer I can pass on the particulars, so he can make sure it can take in account on how it all works. Me, I'm just an animator, Artist,  writer, and a terrable speller, Dyslexia is my excuse for that. He is the computer wiz. He just needed to know about the great info everybody is supplying. Thanks.

In that case, you only need to be concerned with what Cinema is capable of, because the functionality you're going to be using in Poser is absolutely the same regardless of which version of Windows or what processor you choose. The actual Poser executable is a regular single threaded 32-bit application and it will run the same on Vista x64 as it does on plain old Windows XP.

After looking at all the options, I really like the Intel i7. From what I've read it is the imediate future. One Big probem that I am concerend with is it working with my main Programs. Cinema, Poser 7, and Vue 7 xtream. I know it works with Adobe Software CS4.

I did an i7 build with 6 Gigs DRR3, 64b Vista.  Have been using it for about 2 weeks with Poser 7 and am VERY happy.  [Previously, a 2 year old AMD dual core.]

Renders are faster, but not lightening fast.  The huge improvement for me is the ability to handle 6+ figures with clothes and props.  Smooth as silk.  Never freezed, never looses textures,  never crashes - at least, not yet.

Hey that's good news, I wasn't sure Poser would match up with i7. If Poser works with it, then I can't image that Vue and Cinema don't either. well the computer I have now is not even a dual core, nor 64 bit. This is going to be the computer I use when I have my i7 machine rendering the big renderhog scenes. and also complex animation set ups.

As you mentioned with handling multi figures will be great. With that news, that will let me have Poser 7 set up on both my computers. Then I can animate in the older computer while the i7 is rendering. I will import those animations into my i7 machine. You are the first person that has the i7 that I have heard from. I've been reading about how good it is, especially how stable it is. Thanks.

You should never have to worry about your hardware configuration being incompatible with an application, because if Windows can run on the hardware (and anything you can find in the consumer market is Windows compatible), your application can too because your application is running on top of Windows (with the exception of certain GPU accelerated applications). This is especially true for CPUs because any CPU you can find will use an x86 architecture or derivative (x86-64 or IA-64).

You just have to make sure all of your hardware is compatible with the other components in your system (mobo has to have the right CPU socket, i7 is only compatible with DDR3 RAM, certain motherboards no longer have IDE drive support, etc).

There are 3 different i7s out there. the 3.2, the 2.8, and the I think its the 2.4.
I was going for the 2.8, as the 3.2 is more than twice the price, and the 2.8 is suppose to be faster than the x2 Quad .

What amazies me is the home computers today, can outperform what they had launching the first moon landing which was the best we could put together at the time. Hey thanks, I will pass this info to the guy building my computer.

Actually, the i7 chips are available at 2.66 GHz,  2.93 GHz and 3.2 GHz, but yes the i7 920 is definitely more powerful than the Q6600. If you're going to be rendering in Cinema 4D, you may want to seriously consider the i7 920, because it is about 25-30 percent more powerful than the Q6600 in most benchmarks, and when you factor in that i7 chips now have hyperthreading (which Cinema 4D supports) and Core 2 chips don't, that's another 10-12% performance difference, which means render times in Cinema 4D are potentially almost cut in half by the i7 versus the Q6600. Benchmarks are showing that this is definitely the case.

http://www.behardware.com/articles/737-7/report-the-intel-core-i7-in-practice.html

Of course, DDR3 RAM and i7 compatible motherboards are a fair bit more expensive than a Core 2 Quad system with DDR2 RAM. It's up to you whether it's worth an extra $200-300 for a 40% reduction in render times.

I take it that you got the 3.2 with the DDR3 ram for i7. I don't know, I have my computer guy trying to find the best prices for what I need. I'm spending a bunch of money, He keeps telling me the same as you. of course he is not the one spending the money. I'm thinking over. If I can get a good price by cutting out some extras on some of my software extras we'll see. 

Here is the breakdown in Euros and dollars (approcs);

CPU: i7 920 (2.66 Ghz) : € 270  ($ 400) Seems to be a reasonable price/performance ratio.
Q6600 or Q8200: € 180 ($ 270)

You save $90

Mainboard: cheapest Socket 1366 mainboard I saw was € 220 ($330)
Good 775 mainboard: € 85 ($125)
You save $200

Memory: 6 GB DDR3 Tri -kit : € 140)
8 GB DDR2 kit: also € 140.

It's around $300 indeed that you can save, especially on the mainboard.

Depending on the kind of rendering you do, those extra 2 GB of RAM in the DDR2 setup may more than compensate for the faster CPU speed of the i7 system. I know that my own work profits more from RAM than from CPU.

Bear in mind that it's not only the CPU that affects computer performance. Nowadays, the main bottlenecks are disk drives and network cards.

Quote - I take it that you got the 3.2 with the DDR3 ram for i7. I don't know, I have my computer guy trying to find the best prices for what I need. I'm spending a bunch of money, He keeps telling me the same as you. of course he is not the one spending the money. I'm thinking over. If I can get a good price by cutting out some extras on some of my software extras we'll see. 

I didn't say anything about the 3.2 GHz i7. It's absurdly expensive. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I'm saying that the 2.66 GHz i7, the 920 (the least expensive one), is 40% faster in Cinema benchmarks than the Q6600 and 20-30% faster in most other benchmarks. I would probably go with the 920 i7. It's the least expensive i7 processor by far, but it is significantly more powerful than the Q6600.

And by going with the i7 chipset now, you have an upgrade path, because LGA1366 and DDR3 is going to be what Intel is developing for over the next couple years. LGA775 and DDR2 are going to be phased out and there isn't going to be anything more powerful for that platform a year or two from now. You'll have to buy an LGA1366 and DDR3 based system eventually. If you buy the motherboard and RAM now, you won't have to buy it later. You can just pick up a new CPU or another stick or RAM down the road if you want. You won't be able to do that if you go with LGA775 and DDR2. Even AMD is going to DDR3 and will not be developing any more DDR2 based chipsets soon.

If you can go 3-4 years without upgrading, then you might want to consider buying the Q6600 and DDR2 RAM, but do keep in mind that it is 40% less powerful than the 920 and DDR3 configuration. That disparity in performance will only become more apparent as time goes on.

Here's a comparison:
Intel i7 920 2.66 GHz CPU $295
MSI X58 LGA1366 Motherboard $220
6GB G.SKILL DDR3-1333 Triple Channel RAM Kit $145

Total: $660

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz CPU $190
Gigabyte P43 LGA775 Motherboard $80
Transcend 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 Dual Channel RAM Kit $68 (you'll want two of those to get 8GB)

Total: $338

So the i7 configuration would cost almost twice as much, but Cinema renders are almost twice as fast. You would also be able to upgrade in 2-3 years without having to buy all new hardware (which you're doing now with either configuration anyway). So the bang for the buck is almost the same, you just have to decide how much horsepower you want, and how much you think you'll need in the future. Either one is a very good value and the Q6600/DDR2 based system would be a very good system right now (a fair bit better than what I'm running at the moment - I'm overdue to upgrade though). That said, the LGA775 platform and DDR2 are near the end of their lifespan and if you want to upgrade 2 years from now, you will be forced to buy an LGA1366 motherboard and DDR3.

 Do a little research on the components; DDR-3 is currently turning in a less that 5% speed increase over DDR-2. If that benchmark noticeable fraction is worth the $300 buck, get the bleeding edge. I tend to stay a generation behind the bleeding edge, myself; it saves you money, and compatibility headaches that nearly always arise when new hardware meets old software....

I didn't say you were using the 3.2, I just just had a hunch you might be. Anyway I've decided on the Intel i7 2.93. My computer guy is giving me all the Prices and Places to by the equipment tomorrow and let me decide.

I know svdl that the Q6600 is cheaper, and I apreciate your input. But when it all boils down to it. Working with Cinema and the extra speed is the deciding factor. as JKFokker mentioned, and I had also been thinging, I really need to move to the future. My biggest concern had been all along was any Software issues with the i7. From everything I've heard was there is no major issues that warrent me not to get the Intell i7.

As in 3 Years I might be upgrading again. Technology never stands still. For the most part I should have pretty much everything I need for a good while except upgrading the computer when nessesary.
thanks all!

I found out over the years that I don't upgrade computers. When I want better performance, I usually build myself a complete new machine, and relegate the older machine to less intensive tasks (or I sell it).

Reason: the performance of a machine is the total of CPU, memory, disk, graphics card and mainboard combined. In 3 years time, the current bleeding edge chipsets and mainboards will be slow mainstream. I'm not going to put a fast CPU in a mainboard that can't keep up with it - I buy a matching mainboard along with the CPU.
Same goes for memory, disk and graphics card.
The only thing I tend to keep is system cases - when they're good. One of my machines is sitting in an 8 year old Chieftec that's solid enough to use as a stool.

In my opinion, the upgrade argument is a weak one.

The raw performance argument is far more convincing. If the 920 indeed performs 40% faster on your key applications, it very well may be worth the extra money.

Quote -  Do a little research on the components; DDR-3 is currently turning in a less that 5% speed increase over DDR-2. If that benchmark noticeable fraction is worth the $300 buck, get the bleeding edge. I tend to stay a generation behind the bleeding edge, myself; it saves you money, and compatibility headaches that nearly always arise when new hardware meets old software....

In a 1:1 comparison, yes, DDR3 RAM is marginally slower. However, when paired with an i7 CPU, which has an on-die memory controller, it is faster AND can be run in triple channel, something that DDR2 cannot and neither AMD nor older Intel chipsets can do. When run in triple channel with the new on-die memory controller, there is a significant performance difference between DDR3 and DDR2.

Quote - I'm not going to put a fast CPU in a mainboard that can't keep up with it - I buy a matching mainboard along with the CPU.
Same goes for memory, disk and graphics card.
The only thing I tend to keep is system cases - when they're good. One of my machines is sitting in an 8 year old Chieftec that's solid enough to use as a stool.

1. The mainboard chipset makes a very marginal difference in performance, especially now that Intel has developed an on-die memory controller. There is no more Northbridge chip on i7 compatible mainboards, which makes the mainboard even less influential on system performance.

2. DDR2 RAM speeds have been the same for YEARS now. CPU manufacturers effectively made DDR2-800 the standard since 2004, so unless you're overclocking, there has no difference in RAM performance for over four years now.

3. Only video games and a couple of h.264 video encoders make significant use of GPU horsepower, and these days, video games are not particularly CPU dependent (the sole exception being Supreme Commander). You can easily run many new games with high end GPU paired with a budget CPU with minimal detriment to performance, so GPU upgrades are in no way tied to CPU upgrades.

At this point, DDR3 RAM has been out long enough that it's not going to get much faster and even if it does, CPU manufacturers have settled on making DDR3-1333 the default, so any sticks of DDR3-1333 you purchase now for an i7 system will never need to be upgraded, except possibly to buy another stick in 2-3 years.

Quote - I found out over the years that I don't upgrade computers. When I want better performance, I usually build myself a complete new machine, and relegate the older machine to less intensive tasks (or I sell it).

Same here. Except I don't sell my old ones, just move them around and use them for different things and distributed rendering. The PC I built two years ago is now a ridiculously over-powered stereo with my entire CD collection on it, taking up only about a third of its storage capacity.
I also have a ridiculously over-powered DVD player, since the one hooked to my TV died.  ;-)

Hmmm I'm thinking of building a computer myself.  I hear NewEgg.com is a good source.
Anybody have any expereince with them or know of another good supplier out of the US?

NewEgg is by far the biggest and most popular online PC hardware retailer. I'd buy from them before anyone else. Sometimes you'll find better deals at other retailers. Among them, mwave would be my next choice. They're just as reliable as NewEgg, occasionally have better prices, but they don't have as much selection. SuperBiiz and Directron are also highly regarded. Zip Zoom Fly used to be very good, but they're reputation isn't what it used to be. Avoid Tiger Direct like the plague.

hey thanks