RobynsVeil,

I have dual booted my computer with Ubuntu 12.04 (Dreamstudio Distro) and Windows 7 64.  I've never considered building my own version of Blender under Linux as I still run Blender under Windows primarily.  Every couple of days I download the latest Windows build from http://builder.blender.org/download/

I have compared the speeds of rendering a scene with Cycles in Blender on my system under various Windows and Linux builds and have found that the Windows mingw compiled version runs the fastest by about 45% compared to the normal stable releases from Blender.org.  

I do want to thank you though because after reading through this post I downloaded the cuda toolkit and drivers you mentioned above and now have Blender using the cuda cores on my graphics card whereas before they were never identified.

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