Scott Sexton & David Lewis <2b### [at] cheerfulcom> wrote:
: I have a newish eMachine (low priced PC) with an AMD 333Mhz K2 that
: renders all my old povray scenes slower than my laptop with a 120Mhz
: Pentium (like 1/3 the speed rather than 3 times faster, as I would think
: it should). This very slow rendering performance occurs under both the
: Win98 and Mandrake Linux 6.0 OS installations on the eMachine so it does
: not appear to be a OS or software installation problem to me. (Perhaps
: the K2's L2 cache? but the laptop is older and only has smallish
: processor cache anyway.)

  The MHz amount tells very little about the real speed of the computer.
  I remember that some time ago a friend of mine had a 486DX4 overclocked
to 120MHz but it was a lot slower (in games, demos, etc) than my
486DX2 66MHz. The reason was that he had an ISA video card while I had a
VLB one. It's incredible how a slow video card can slow down a twice faster
computer so much.

  Of course the problem in your case can't be the video card, but the point
is that the MHz amount can be very misleading. Some poor component can make
the computer slower than other with half of MHz's.
  Perhaps you have a slow component slowing down the whole thing.
  Also I think that AMD has a quite slow FPU.

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):5;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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