Well its here, ripped the guts out of the old system (graphics card, Hard disks etc) gave it a fresh install of Vista and ... .. . well it works.
Um, not quite sure what's going on here but I loaded up the default Terragen scene from
3DSpeedMachine and gave it a render.
On my last rig, Q9450 2.66Ghz the scene rendered in
16m 5s, on my new rig, i7 920, it renders in
18m 23s 
Not good, I was expecting results nearer the 7m or 8m mark as have been posted by some Terragen users with similar setups. Must be doing something wrong.
Ok so maybe they overclocked their set-ups (the 3DSpeedMachine site has no provision for noting overclocks). After much fiddling about I figured out how to overclock my 2.66Ghz to 4Ghz (wasn't that hard
) and made another render, this one came in at
12m 19s, better but still nothing like the performance I was hoping for.
Must be dooing something wrong. Has the scene been changed since I made my old benchmark, I doubt it.
It cirtainly seems faster, especially in OC'd mode and I gues one of the big issues with that scene in particular is that no matter what your set-up the reflective black sphere on the water is a render killer and it gets stuck on just one thread. (dl the scene, you'll see
)
I'll have to dive further into the Overlocking aspects and see if I cant get some improvements, also will try using 8 threads, might help ... .. .
All in all not as impressed as I was hopping for
Oh well
Richard
