On my old poser 6 with a single core system, the CPU worked at 100% all the time while rendering, I didn't expect this with multi-cores but most of the time it sits lower that 30% usage..

I'm running a 3.2GHz Phenom II X6 with 8GB Crucial DDR3 on an Asus M4A87TD.  Now I have XP pro 64bit on an old Seagate drive, but I bought a new 64GB Crucial SSD and installed poser pro 2010 on there, pointed the temp folder to there as well...I expected my old HD to be the bottleneck but now running an SSD and its still as slow (not using all the cores fully).. I attach a pic of CPU usage while running render. 

have tried.. bucket sizes 64, 128, 256 with no real difference, un-ticking separate processes seemed to speed it up a very little.  tried 3, 6, 12 threads with no real difference. max cached renders up to 12 with no difference and paging has always been turned off.

 

my question, is anyone having the same issue? is anyone getting better CPU usage? anyone think of something I might have overlooked?

 

very sincere thanks for all who have read this far, hope someone can point me in the right direction :)