Well, I said that I would post how my upgrade went... I just installed a Abit MB with a Athlon 800 CPU. Took 15 mins to swap the MB and all hardware, and the only problem I had was the comp refused to boot when my AGP card was in... Using my laptop, I posted a quick message on the abit newsgroup and actually got a reply fairly quickly with the solution, a bios setting was wrong... But what was more incredible, was the fact that the person who responded was from abit tech support... On my previous Asus MB, I never was able to get support from Asus... everyone complained that their emails went unanswered.. So, long story short, after fixing the OS and running setup to recognize all the new hardware, I am now the happy owner of a Athlon 800 with 572 MB of RAM... I did a quick Poser render this morning and was amazed at how fast it went... I usually set my lights map size to 4096 and when it renders shadows, I usually go out for a smoke... this time the bar just zipped right by and the whole render process took less than a minute... (this was with my most recent picture in the gallery with the 3 figures) Anyone wishing to speed up Poser, a faster CPU works wonders. Darrin

Glad it went well for you Darrin. I've never tried any of the Athlon chips, but I've heard good things of them Paul

They're supposed to be 5 - 10 % faster than a comparable PIII. In fact, WinMag used Bryce 4 as one of their benchmark apps and it rendered the same scene about 7% faster, I think it was. This was back in April right after the 1000MHZ systems were introduced. Personally, I've found nothing wrong with my K6-2 and am planning on upgrading to an Athlon and abit board when the funds are available. HTH, John

never had a problem with athlon chips, and abit tech support is great. Asus is infamous for not providing support at all. As far as speeding up poser goes, a processor upgrade makes the most sense, especially when you can pick up a 800 mhz amd thunderbird (note that the thunderbird is a socket A chip, not a slot, and performs much faster, especially in floating point, than the slot A athlon) for under $200 USD.