For running Poser 4 & 5. Any known issues?

In my humble opinion, Athlon is an all around better processor. The price/performance ratio is better, especially when combining an Athlon XP and Windows XP. And if you can afford it, I recommend 512 MB of DDR RAM (such as PC2100). Poser 4 runs very nicely on the Athlon PC I have at the house. Brian

My Athlon is actually faster than many of the Pentium4 they have tested. I have no problems with 3d games and apps.

I have heard that Pentiums are slightly better at 3D, but like Brian says they are usually more expensive, so Athlons would be better at any given price band I am saving up for an Athlon as we speak!!! :)

hrm in my experience Athalons crap out during renders, and on any graphic intesive program, my p4 does not. It have more to do with the hardware combination than the actuall processor though. When I had Athalons in my computers we replaced everything trying to get them not to crap out on graphic intesives stuff(mostly video cards). The problem wasn't fixed until we switched to Intel.

I love my Athlon and it has never yet let me down when rendering - even images with several (9) hi-res characters and a prop laden scene. Jack

The only issue I've had, is the Pentium's screen refresh and video playback are much smoother when you're at less than 32MB of video memory. But if you're 32MB or above, it's not an issue. I have an AMD 500mhz and a PII 350, and the PII runs Poser about 45% faster in everything but renders. Render times ae about the same on both machines. Considering you can get a P4 2.0Ghz barebones system for $300, might as well go for the P4...

I used to be a "it ain't geniune unless it is intel" kind of guy til I did my upgrades and went with the less expensive Athlon. All I can say is that I am a convert now and care very little for intel chips. Athlon is the way to go. Most bang for the $ over the overpriced Intel chips.

My Athlon 1.4 about as fast as my P4 1.8 both with 1Gb RAM. The Athlon machine runs 3D-apps just as good as anything. I'd say go for an Athlon. /Ohman

I used an Athlon Thunderbird 1GIG, never crapped out (the mobo did, twice) I now use dual athlon's...never craps out

i have a athlon 1.3 ghz and just upgraded 256 ddr to 512 and i'm still having problems rendering a 800 x800 of anything:-( i am convinced by many threads here (and there) that my problem with renders is Windows ME. so i hope soon to clean install xp.

I've been an athelon fan for years and now with the new RISC processor, I'm sold for life.

" new RISC processor?" um the risc is the processor used for macs from day one. ~g~ technically, the athlon chips do more work at lower clockspeeds, a 800mhz athlon is a faster running chip than a 1.4 ghz intel p4 by benchmark test. cost, now at least, is not much difference between the two, the amd being a bit lower, but the performance, by benchmark testing standards, is actually much higher with the amd athlon. the 1.8 ghz athlon is eqivalent to a 2.4 ghz intel p4

I would prefer a Athlon (what i have now) because they're much cheaper with at least same performance. So you get more with a Athlon for your money. A few of them had built in 3D-technology , means they're explicitlly designed for 3D-applications. The technology is called 3D-Now and is stamped on the package nd processor too.

Cinnamon, if you haven't obtained it yet, you might want to consider Windows 2000. It won't have all the eyecandy and 'special features' that XP has, but under the hood they are essentially the same. And Win2k doesn't require activation, just the good ol serial number. And dual booting is much nicer with Win2k, if you want to retain the 9x compatibility. As for the CPU wars, the last Intel chip I owned was a 386SX-40. It was also the first and last computer I bought assembled. Been building them ever since, and been AMD all the way. Well, for instance; one render I did had 4 Poser characters (Mike, Vicki, PS kid, and PT kid), three sets of Travellers faun legs and horns, two of Steffy ZZ's system killer textures, and slightly more benign hi res for the others, imported into Vue 4 into a scene with 2 of the flowering cherry trees, multiple hills, a couple of fill lights...all told over 255 items, and in excess of 4,000,000 polygons. My XP-1700 handled the load just fine. Had to boost my swap file up to a gig, but... ;) AMD has the best cost/performance ratio, and as others have said, you can take the money you save on that and put it elsewhere, like more ram, or multiple hard drives. Don't worry about things like '3D-Now' or MMX or SSE-2; they are essentially the same thing, unique instructions that have been added to the standard X-86 code base, and registers added to the actual CPU, that permit certain graphics and audio processing calls to bypass the longer pipelines in processing and speed up response time. Their usage spotty at best, and they are still more marketing tools than anything else. They work, but they aren't considered something neccesary.

The original Macs were Motorola 68k, thoroughly non-RISC - it was the PowerPC chip (right name?) that introduced that technology in the Power Macs, though I think Acorn came first with the Archimedes and there were specialist boxes too.

A while back there was a thread in which performance of different computers was tested with a scene Jim Burton made. The results were that with Poser4 the AthlonXP definitely defeats the P4. That said, Poser5 might behave differently, but I don't really expect it to have special P4 optimizations. If that new render engine leans heavily on FPU (which I expect it will) then AthlonXP will probably again beat the P4. Performance also depends heavily on RAM, so don't forget to take that into consideration when comparing an Athlon and P4 system.

When you get an Athlon be careful which motherboard/chipset you use with it. Some of them have had problems that then get blamed on the processor. On the other hand, I have had bad Intel boards too. Also the Athlons tend to run hotter than the Pentiums, so make sure the CPU cooling fan is properly greased down and the airflow is good.

Some people prefer Intel chipset motherboards over VIA or SIS chipset motherboards. In that case you have to stick to a P4 CPU, since Intel does not make chipsets for Athlon. But I see many people with P4 motherboards using a VIA or SIS chipset and those motherboards are just as good (or bad) as the Athlon motherboards. Anyway, the problems with VIA motherboards seem to be a thing of the past mainly. About the temperature. Yes the Athlons get hotter than the pentiums, but then again the Athlons are designed to be able to run at higher temperatures then the P4 too. So it doesn't matter that they get hotter. I'd mainly focus on getting a cooling fan that doesn't make too much noise.