I have already published this question in Hardware/Technical but thought I would ask in a Poser related forum as well. If this is out of place, please feel free to move it to where it belongs for delete it if necessary with my apologies. I'm a Poser5&6/3DSMax6 user. I'm currently running Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 with an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton CPU (with clock limiting), 1G RAM and a GForce FX 5200 w/256M video card. Running Poser 6 SP1 most everything works fine. I do notice some odd issues where when you select an object, the title in the Dial dialog doesn't always change. This seems new to P6 since I never saw this in P5 SP4. But other than a few minor oddities, it seems to be running as expected. My questions has to do with rendering speeds. Note that editing, zooming, rotating and the like are snappy and quick. I'm happy with how that works. But when render time comes, it can really seem to crawl. P5 was slow too for me so I don't think it's so much a P6 problem. I realize rendering is all about CPU speed. I was considering upgrading, (....AGAIN), but wanting to upgrade in the right direction. I've always run AMD and have been happy. But that may be because I don't know what I'm missing. Here is what I want to gain in my upgrade.... 1. Faster final rendering. 2. Be able to render with hair, background and textures without failure. I've had lots of time where if I render a closeup of V3's head without hair, it renders without issue. But if I add hair, conforming hair, (non-dynamic), it may or may not fail. Is this a RAM issue? Could it really need more than a GIG? It just sounds like a lot of memory. 3. Better 3D artistry skills.... (Not sure hardware will help here, unless someone knows were I can connect to the MATRIX... hehehe) I've been trying to research CPU's between AMD & Intel. So a question would be would going to an Athlon64 3200+ really gain me any noticable increase? I mean if a render currently takes 12 minutes, would it drop to 5 minutes? Saving a minute or two doesn't seem worth the money. But if it could be cut in half, that'd be worth something to me. Espcially for animations. Looking at some charts from TomsHardware it showed Intel being faster at integer math and AMD being faster at MMX64 functions. Which of these two issues are important to rendering? I also do some gaming on this box when I get pissed at my ability for 3D artristy, or rather lack thereof, so it would be nice to have a speedy system for that as well. I guess, after all this rag chewing, I want to know if I should just settle for what I have because upgrading at what I can afford wouldn't make that big of a difference. Or would going from and AthlonXP 2500+ to an Athlon64 3200+ be worth the motherboard and CPU costs? TomsHardware did a test of 10 MB's and chose the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce4 Ultra S939 ATX PCI-E as one of the two best. So I'm looking at about $450 for a board, CPU and Fan. I can afford this, but what kind of increase do you think I would see? Would it double my thruput? Thanks in advance for your patience in reading all of this and for your responses. Nebula