What affects bryce render times the most, is it the speed of the pc, the amount of ram or the freespace on the HD. I ask because tame teccie came round with a machine he had put together mostly from bits he had left from other projects. He asked me to put it through its paces. I installed bryce and copied over the file of a scene I was working on. Render time at size 1200x900 was 4hrs 54min. On my own machine same image render time 10hrs 26min. I have an athlon with 71XE4 motherboard, (speed 800) 512mb ram (But only pc100 ram) and 80gig HD partioned and mostly quite full up. The new machine has Athlon duron motherboard, which he tells me is 1.7mh, 128mb less ram but the ram is pc133, and of course there is nothing else on the machine as yet. This is an important question for me, because if he gets some more bits hanging around he may be able to upgrade my machine for absolute minimum cost (he owes me money so needs to keep me sweet because I keep winging at him). So which would be the best way to go?

The greatest part of wisdom is learning to develop  the ineffable genius of extracting the "neither here nor there" out of any situation...."