G'day Ladies and Gents,

I guess not everyone has enough computers to make meaningful comparisons concerning rendering speed.
I'm just cleaning up my little renderfarm and made some tests with different configurations.
The Vue 8 scene used for the test was always the same.

Note that PC 4+5 are dedicated (identical) RenderCows and have absolutely all unnecessary background services disabled, whereas the rest are just 'normal' work PCs with most of the Windows default services still running.

If you think that's too geeky just ignore this thread

Hardware used:

PC 1: 3.8 GHz Dual Core 8GB RAM, VERY fast SSD for swap and temporary files, Windows 7 64 bit

PC 2: 2.9 GHz Quad Core 4GB RAM, testes with and without (normal) SSD drive for swap and temporary files, Windows XP Professional 32 bit

PC 3: AMD X64 2.4 GHz Dual Core 4GB RAM, one average SATA disk drive, Windows XP Professional 32 bit

PC 4+5: 2.6 GHz QuadCore 4 GB RAM, one average SATA disk drive, various operating systems

Render times:

PC 1: 6:13 min

PC 2: 7:05 min with SSD, 7:48 min with fast SATA drive

PC 3: 15:22 min

PC 4+5:

1. Windows XP Professional 32 bit: 8:42 min
2. Windows Vista Home 32 bit: 8:26 min
3. Windows 7 64 bit: 7:21 min

Some remarks:

PC 4+5 have a BIOS option to map hardware addresses to a range outside 4GB for 64 bit operating systems, so under Windows 7 64 bit the complete 4 GB RAM are visible to the OS. Under XP/Vista 32 bit only 3.25 GB RAM are available.

Feel free to post your own conclusions and opinions about this test before I disclose mine