I'm buying a Mac Mini soon, and curious if the 1.25Ghz cpu and the R9200 video card will add any performance to Poser 4. I'm pretty sure D|S would finally be usable, but what about Poser? Vid cards don't do anything for Poser, true, but how big a kick will the new CPU be compared to my old Sawtooth? As it is now, P4 can barely load Mil 3.0 figures, and posing them is next to impossible.

Yup, you'll see a boost from the CPU change. I noticed a big improvement last year when I hopped up my old Cube from a 500MHz G4 chip to the 1.25GHz Powerlogix G4 chip kit. I went from barely running one Vicky 2 at a time to being able to handle 2, or sometimes 3, depending on circumstance, the number of props, etc... Your best bet is to cram in as much RAM as possible while you're at it, though. Even w/ a dual G5 I have now, I noticed a huge boost in going from the default 256MB to 1GB, then a still respectable increase when I bumped it again up to 2GB. (IMHO, if you can afford it, save the pennies for a G5 box. The difference is incredible, to say the least, and once I saw it run, I immediately lost any and all guilt from selling the Cube and buying the dual G5 box like I had.) /P

With the limited upgrade ability of the new Macmini, I also would recommend jumping up to the G5. Of all the things I do on my Macs rendering is the most demanding. Look at a G5 iMac with 2GB, if you can't spring for a TowerOfPower. Don't worry, I'm still going to buy a Macmini but not for rendering;-) To answer your question, yes you will notice an improvement, but this is a how long is a piece of string question. We can't quantify your improvement.