Depends on what graphics card you have. Seriously. Athlon and ATI have been working on serious competition for Intel, and combining an AMD chip with a Radeon card is supposd to up the actual speed rating. I've got the article bookmarked ... uh, somewhere. Might be on the disconnected CPU. Thing is, once you hit the 1.9 range, processors above it aren't that much faster and you might as well go with RAM. I was able to render on a 500 mhz processor, once I upped the RAM to 384. It would render even scenes with multiple Millenium figures, but it took forever. This machine is a 2.0, with 512. I've come close to creating images it has problems with, but that took an AWFUL lot -- 2 fully dressed Vickys, 2 full dressed Mikes, plus an intricate set.