So over the last week or so I've been busy with building my new PC. She's a nice little monster, specced out from the ground up to be nice and durable for at least a few years. I started with a Thermaltake Armor+ VH6000 Super Tower Case (read: BIG DAMN CASE!!) and filled it with an Asus Maximus II Formula MoBo. Her brains are provided by an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 CPU running at 2.83 GHz, and I've dropped in 8 gigs of PC-8500 DDR2 by Mushkin for main memory. Keeping her head cool is a massive Scythe Mugen II Infinity CPU cooler - not to mention half a dozen other fans, including the gigantic 23cm case side fan that came with the Armor+. For video I decided on a Sapphire Radeon 4870 HD 1 gig video card. Her boot drive is a Western Digital 320 gig 7200 RPM drive, and for storage I threw in a 640 gig WD, both SATA. To round things out - and to make use of all that RAM - I put on Windows 7 RC 64-Bit edition.

Can't tell you how fun it was to fire her up for the first time and see her boot to BIOS without any troubles... She's a quiet girl too, for all the fans spinning away inside, and she runs damned fast and smooth.

I tossed Poser 7 on to see how things ran with 4 cores and 8 gigs of memory to render on, and threw the results into my scrap gallery. They're nothing special, as I was running them as rendering tests more than anything else - rendering tests with all the settings a maximum in Poser. The new rig completely blew Poser out of the water by blasting off those renders in an average of five minutes each, a ridiculously fast time compared to the five hour render represented by Blossom Wind on a dual core/2gig machine. To be fair, Blossom Wind was a fair bit more complex than these... but then again, I didn't have the Firefly settings maxed out for Blossom Wind either, and had to do that in eight smaller sections of the full image.

Sometime in the next week I'll load up my saved copy of Blossom and run it again on the new box to see what happens.