Oh man, I am getting very serious and very welcome information from this thread. Thank you all for your clear and careful posts and rifleshot tidbits. Wow. Stewer, downsides of dual noted. And my enthusiasm is not irrational exhuberance, I get it loud and clear that Poser is NOT multi-threaded, but yours (and now others) description of multitasking is very very attractive. Darkphoenix's information on the Task Manager assignment issue seals the deal. Poser may not be multi-threaded for a long time, or ever. I think the "upgrade" to MP rendering of Poser figures is export to Maya/Max/Lightwave, etc. SInce I can't stray from my primary mission, I can not think in terms of "well, go down to a Athlon1700 or 1800 at $100, then you could afford MP." Nope. I want the best render. Will go dual only if I can work the budget up to get dual 2200s. The reason I am going Athlon over Pentium is first price, but also performance. Yes the Northwood Pentiums seem to beat the Aths in quite a few categories in testing. But the top of the line Pent!Vs cost $420-650 and the Ath $288. A little further back from the top, the cost disparity is a little less, but still significant. I am quoting prices from an online component site, UpgradeSource, other sites seem to confirm this price issue. Upgrade has a lot of helpful info, including this page : http://www.upgradesource.com/advice/intelvsamd.html (this is not a plug or affiliate link for me, just a great site) According to an article in XBit, http://www.xbitlabs.com/cpu/northwood-2200/ amazingly, there is evidence that the Athlon might be best on one, specific, targeted task: rendering in 3D. There is no Poser test, but there is a 3ds max render and animation test, nearly the last one all the way at the bottom. The Athlon 2000 beats the 2.2 Ghz Northwood Pentiumns hands down in a render test, and is equal to the Pentium in animation rendering. As for the coolness of Mac? I still have my Mac. It is not a cool Titanium PwerBook, just a 333Mhz G3 box, but I still appreciate the Mac OS. I can use iMovie on it, surf the net, run Canvas, etc. I may not even network the two boxes, since I can transfer files by FTP or on CD. How's this for retro cool: I am a writer. When I am deep in the night and want perfect silence, I go upstairs to a corner of my bedroom. There is a table there on which sits my original Macintosh from 1984. You know, that cute stubby box? No hard drive. No fan. 9" B&W screen. I insert a single-sided, 384K floppy disk. The system (OS 3.4) boots. It takes a while. There is JUST room on the disk for a copy of the original MacWrite and a few small text files. I like the feel of that unique, original keyboard. I write. It works. When I stop typing to think, all is perfectly silent. Cool. ::::: Opera :::::