"I would stay away from the P4 due to their high cost which is not justified by their performance. Tom did a nice article on his site about "Best Bang For The Buck CPUs" which I thought was very enlightening" And for most general use this is currently true, no disagreement at all :) However for code that DOES understand the P4 the upgreade is dramatic and useful for us. 3DS Max and our Mpeg encoder's are an example of this. Photoshop is starting to incorporate them as well. For what I use it for the P4 is dramatically faster than the P3... right now. I can wait the time needed for other applications to catch up and optimize for the P4... Word is plenty fast anyway. Intel is "pushing" the P4, no doubt ... but Intel is also full of really intelligent folks and while it will take time for the optimizations to become the norm they will come :) My interest in the Mac results was more that their numbers varied by much more than the processor speed. That is interesting :) Ah well, I do want to say thanks to Jim for the test, it showed me how much more profitable my time is using the Max system as my primary render tool... I had been bringing my poser scenes in only at the end of their life - now I will pull them in much earlier :)