So, I finally installed all the necessary software to test the beast out and it's wonderful (THANKS AGAIN TO EVERYONE WHO DONATED!!!) - rendering runs much much faster than on the old computer - I tried rendering the first half-hour of ESB v2.0 with the same settings I used for the v2.1 AVCHD of SW and the average speed of the second pass was around 35fps, whereas, if I remember correctly, I was getting like 3fps with the old computer. (BTW, I wrote more about this in the ESB thread).

At first I was a bit disappointed with the rendering speed in After Effects (BTW, I'd like to thank Chris Solo for donating the entire Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium package to me!) but then I realized I didn't have multi-threading turned on - after that, it runs like lightning (although, when I selected 4 CPUs to be used, each could be allocated maximum 2GB of memory (it always keeps some memory for the system) and the rendering kept crushing, so I had to allocate 3GB to each CPU and this resulted in only 2 CPUs being used for rendering, which is a bit slower but still miles better than what I was used to - but I guess, I will have to save up for some additional RAM in order to get maximum use out of my CPU :-)