Quote - What have you found to be a great configuration with regard to RAM memory and video cards for improving rendering speed. Is there a need for more than 8GB RAM? I have seen systems with 2 video cards, is there an advantage to this in Poser or just with gaming? Lance

     Get as much RAM as you can afford and which the motherboard allows.  I had considered getting three 8GB sticks to put in Galadriel's triple-channel RAM slots, but the Alienware tech said that the motherboard chip can only read 12GB total.  Likewise, Pixie's dual channel can't use two 8GB sticks because the motherboard chip is limited to reading a total of 8GB.

     You may see multiple options for a given amount of RAM;  higher speed is better, and fewer (large) sticks is better than more (small) sticks, because it allows for future RAM addition.

     Is there a need for more than 8GB RAM?  It depends on your habits of scene complexity, total poly count, sophisticated materials, and high quality render settings.  I often exceed 8GB.  That said, Pixie -with 8GB- won't crash on a complex render;  PP2010 will start using the hard drive to compensate.  This really slows the process down, and puts hard mileage on the hard drive.  Poser usually stays under 12GB, and I rarely see Poser pull more than 20GB, with the record being just over 48GB.  My judgement would be that a HyperThreaded quad (like the core i7) with 12GB RAM is a great "bang for the buck" balance.  The more cores you have, the more RAM is needed to feed them.

     Alienware laptops now offer 16GB RAM in the M17x, and the new M18x chassis can hold 32GB!  :woot:

     Video card:  Poser does not render using the video card, but the preview quality is better if you have at least a midrange quality card so that you can use hardware shading in preview.  Anything beyond that is overkill for the current version of Poser.  Also consider if you will ever use Vue on the machine;  Vue's preview benefits immensely from a high capacity video card.  A good video card will also enable you to run a second monitor, for instance when you're at home you could have both the laptop's monitor and a 27" 1920x1200 pixel flat screen as your workspace.  If you see a Quadro as one of the video card options, that's a professional workstation card - expensive, but great stuff if you want to be able to see detail in preview during scene setup in Vue, or you want to run a big second monitor.  Galadriel has two 30" widescreens, 2560x1600 pixels each.

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5