There is a certain satisfaction that comes from building your own computer using components of your own choosing and then seeing it perform at levels well beyond those of the "off the shelf" systems costing twice as much. "Can we build one for you?"....LMAO

Speaking as someone who built my own systems for years and still do when a client wants something hyper custom I can safely say this...

These days I buy my systems from Dell when I am looking for big iron or eMachines when I am looking for budget. It simply isn't worth the time any more to match the components, track down all the pricing and put it all together and troubleshoot. I like the eMachines BTW - they use off the shelf parts, the price is good and we have 4 in service that have never given us any problem - 24/7/365 for a few years in some cases.

Is there any satisfaction to it? I suppose - but not after a while... it simply gets kind of old :) I think I've built a hundred or more over the years and I have to tell you the thrill is just plain gone.

3 weeks ago we realized here we were going to be WAY short on processor power for our project. I >COULD< have spend 3 days building new boxes and saved some cash up front but I would have lost more money than that in billable time. Instead we hit Dell at 3 a.m. got our credit approval in 10 minutes and had 2 high end boxes pre-configured for DVD writing in 3 days or so... and I could do billable work in the meantime.

When the machines got here they were in service in under an hour - no driver hassles and it all just WORKED. Could I have saved some up front money? Sure. Would it have been useful? Not by a long shot.

The credit? Yeah, the rate is steep... but we will pay them off in 15 days or so when we bill this client for the time and the extra work we can get done. A short term instant business loan in my books :)

Most of my clients run Dell's as well if they are in production environments. When and IF something dies they replacement part ships in 12 hours usually if they need it fast. They save money on downtime as well.

So, if you have the time to spend on the homebuilding it's a fun hobby in my mind... but when you're doing the dance of billable hours I put it away with most of my hobbies.

For similar reasons we run Intel chips here. Yeah, the AMD is a good chip and has some speed in some cases, but on optimized software we are VERY happy with our P4's and P3's. When we need to encode video (and we do a lot of that) then it is a godsend to have the speed. Oh, and the Intel chips don't catch fire if the fan falls off :)

My results:

1.8 ghz P4 with 512mg RDRAM.

My poser times sucked. Of course I didn't clean boot the box... I have too much stuff happening. Task Manager shows 53 processes running including Outlook and Photoshop. It took Poser 1:53 seconds or 113 seconds total. Beats the heck out of me why. I suspect some oddities in Poser  and this task load.

As a side note: 3D Studio Max ran the test (I matched the lights as well as I could and turned shadows on) in 11 seconds flat on the same machine with the same task load (right after I closed Poser).

So I'll be rendering in Max from now on :)