Thank you for taking the time and the trouble.



I find the results rather shocking - I would not have guessed that switching 
from 32 to 64 bit would make such a difference. I am thinking of installing 
a 64bit Linux and a 64bit PovRay and doing the benchmark again.



However, this explains the difference between this benchmark and the 
benchmarks I studied when deciding which processor to buy. On 32 bit OS the 
difference between Q9550 and i7 is significant but not too big. For daily 
work I do not need this much computing power and memory. But it is nice to 
have - experimenting with our favourite ray tracer is really fun now. Until 
last month I was still using a 32 bit Athlon 2.4 GHz processor, on which the 
benchmark took 989 seconds.



Since you seem to be intimately involved in Pov Ray beta testing, maybe you 
can answer the question if the benchmark makes extensive use of memory. 
Maybe the difference between 3 and 6 GB would account for the difference 
between 32/64 OS.

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