"I built my own, I gather most of us did, rather that buy an already set up box" Well, I don't have the skills to build my own and had to buy what I could get off the shelf. Quite frankly, the relatively small selection of Athlon pcs that were available sucked (Celeron's and Durons were all over the place, but I wasn't interested in those). Small cases, small hard drives, no CDRW (more often than I would have thought), crappy integrated video cards using shared memory, etc. I bought a whole computer, not a processor. The Athlon choices I was given just weren't up to par. It would have cost me a mint to upgrade to match the other features of the P4 I choose (there wasn't a PIII to be found btw...only in laptops). I actually priced it out for the best Athlon I could find and would have had to spend $160 more to make it otherwise comparable...plus all the time and effort to change all the hardware. Then I'd have the joy of having that unused hardware reminding me a big chunk of money was spent for them to sit there and do nothing. Truly not worth it for a few seconds rendering time. I use my PC for lots of things, not just 3D work, and it performs great for everything I do. Anyway, I don't really care if some Athlons "beat" my computer, my computer beat some Athlons too. Big deal--it does what I want it to do and I'm happy so that's all that matters :)