Have 1.4g athelon and 512 ram. MB will go to 2.1g athelon chip max according to the bios info. Beyond that I'll need a different board. (have Asus A7m266). So, for about $100 I can either get a 2.1 chip or another 512 stick. I can get one or the other. If I need both, then it makes sense to wait a bit and bare bones it with something more robust. What would be the better choice, cpu or stick? I'm not experiencing much in the way of bugs with P5 on Win2kSP3. Only thing is that when I move around in the workspace with Judy its notchie and I don't like that. Not notchy to move the trackball with Vickey. Some slowdowns when changing rooms, as others have experienced and that should be a patch issue.

Personally... I'd go wih the RAM stick.

Memory, definatly memory.. I sport 1G of mem and Poser goes alot smoother.

But there's a big difference between 1.4 and 2.1 chip and if I understand right, the chip is crucial to render time. Not that render time is a problem, Poser is way faster than Bryce. But when I tried a flash render it ground to a halt. Ok, so maybe 512 isn't enough. That beggs the question of ram speed. The ddr is 266. There's faster out there, but I'm not sure the pc3200 is all that necessary. Seems to me that capacity (1g over half g) is more important than clock speed.

Oh, and one observation, I'm not seeing the led on the HD flash when I play which tells me its not going to the swap drive yet. You can tell if you ram out because the swap drive runs the LED like crazy. Just don't see that.

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.

True, but if this system is for poser then and old pci S3 video will do, since it doesn't use the video at all really. The speed of the memory really isn't key either. in poser's case it comes down to is there enought adressable memory to keep the textures, and objects. The more meory can hold the less disk cashing and virtual memory is used.

I would go with ram, I run an 800 mhz atholon chip with win xp platform. If I put poser 5 as a high priority I can reander 2 fully transed judys including p5 hair and about 10 props. In about 15 min. Im also useing 768meg of ram and a radon 8500 128meg vidio card. I have had no p5 lock-ups on a 120 frame walking animation. Thats why Id go with ram. Also, look into high end vidio cards. The ATI series is set up to help when rendering.

I'm running an ATI all in wonder 8500DV. Been using AMD/ATI/Asus since the 486 days. Seems to be a winning combination. I've built dozens of machines and the ones with these names in them have always been the smoothest. I match ram chips, etc. Real picky about the components. I'll choose the mfgr, just want to know what folks think is the bottleneck.

RAM first, then CPU By the time you have another 100 bucks, the CPU you can buy with it will be that much better, but the RAM needs will be the same.

I'll likely go with both. The CPU limitation is my bios and I didn't want to speck out a new system at this time (which would be necessary if I decide to change the MB). Amd is not far away from the hammer breakthrough so its worth doing a cheezy upgrade now and rebuild later. Any thoughts that I should go higher than 1g ram?

RAM. Definitely RAM. And do a google search for cacheman, a nice little freeware-shareware utility that will comb through your system's memory and free it from inactive program stubs, dlls, and the like that weren't cleaned up. The more silicon and the less fileswapping you do, the happier graphics programs in general and Poser in particular is.

As far as processor, the key thing to remember is the speed of your bus. Even if a system has a 2.6 Ghz prc it will only really has a bus speed of 400Mhz. Still a greater than 1 ghz prc will interally get the job done, that "Bottle neck" you are really looking for is there. Think of it like driving a porsche wil tires that will explode at 80 mph, yeah, it can go faster, but the tires will only spin so fast.

Well, I've said it before, and this is the last time (promise). In my experience with quite a few comps. over the years, I get the best results and efficiency, when the ram approximates the cpu speed. It's a remarquable difference. Last time. Over and out! Q

I have a 1.8 pent upgraded from 1.5, not much speed difference. I put a gig of ram in it-- took the expensive fast ram out--383-- and threw slower ram in. All of a sudden I could do twice as much. This was with plenty of free Virtual. I had frozen with Selene and a Marfono set and a ton of lights. Now, no prob. I kknow Pentium and Athlon is talking apples and oranges but still. . .It's definetly the ram. Emily

Frankly, with 512, I think the CPU is a more likely source for improvement. Thats 60% increased throughput. While the RAM is a 100% increase, you have to assume that you are needing 1G to run poser for that to benefit you 100% of the time. Unless you are always doing some huge scenes, 512 should be fine. I have 1G (2 512 sticks) and I think that with my machine (750mhz) the second stick is a waste. Pulling it out changed nothing about posers performance (I even got silly with the content) Eric

Ok, ram it is. If 512 is inadequate for this then so be it. I remember the days when there was a huge difference between 4 and 8 megs but no noticable difference between 8 and 16 megs. those days are gone. If there's now a huge difference between 512 and 1024, I'll do it. As for cacheman, I think that's a win9x thingie, not a win2k thingie. But I did dl it last week just for fun since I'm on a dual boot ME/2k on the same partition with shared services. (IE6 for example lives in the same directory for both OS's as well as modelers and other programs like office xp and outlook). By installing the Me and 2k versions to the same directory, I save disk space. Folks say it can't be done, but my system is rock solid stable on both boots. And Poser 5 is pretty stable for me too. Ok, ram stick it is, and I'll get the cpu for Bryce. 8 months from now I'm sure there will be some exciting technology to look at which will justify a rebuild. as for my bus, its the amd 761 chipset that runs at 266mhz. To change that to 400 or 533 would mean a new MB and right now I don't think the new chipsets are proven or stable given the status of that newly emerging technology. Nor do I think that the faster bus speed is critical here in light of the ability to overclock a 266 to speeds that rival the native 400. I see little speed difference in the overall system performance when I do that. But the one thing I can't simulate is ram capacity which seems to be the consensus. thanks again for the feedback.

Cacheman runs on both the 9X and NT kernels...or has versions that do so (as it's happily chugging away on my 2kPro install right now).

I had no choice (it's a laptop), so I went with RAM... from 384 to the 512MB max that Dell will let me use in this critter. (though I gotta admit that although 384 does okay, I'm just greedy.) I also have a Inspiron 8100 vidcard with more video RAM in that coming as well. Also, I find that I get faster renders in Poser 5 or Bryce if I go into Win2k's Task Manager, Processes tab, and jack up the process priority of Poser 5 to "Above Normal" (anything higher will likely lock up your machine. Just right-click on the process and set its priority, then let that nasty ol' render rip.) /P

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