For that kind of money, do you know what kind of pc you could build. I'm running Carrara on a MSI K7D master. It has 2 x 1.2 AMD mp's running @1.53 ghz. I have a total of about $1000-$1100 US in this box including a IDE Raid setup for ripping video from my DV camcorder.

Dual 1.4 athlons Tyan MP mobo 512 mb ram 1 x 40 gb IBM 120 gxp HDD 2 x 60 gb Maxtor D740x (setup as RAID 0) Geforce 2 GTS 64 mb vid card Promise ata/133 RAID card pyro 1394dv (firewire) card SB Live Platium

Brenthomer, that is athlon xp's not windows xp that I was talking about. I run win2k on all my machines. If your having problems with your system overheating, put an aftermarket heatsink and fan in it. Dete

I have 3 amd tb's and xp's in the house. One of them is a Dual 1.4 amd monster. They all have DC projects on them and run the cpu's at 100% all the time 24/7/365 and I've never had a problem with them yet. Just my .02 Dete It does speed up the render times having duallies.

I've had very little problems with Carrara since they have released the patch. There are a few bugs left, but it's pretty good all in all. I'm running it on an Athlon 1.33 with an Asus A7M266 mobo. 512 megs of ddr ram and a Geforce 2 64 meg vid card. The OS is W2K.