Cool! I added my results to the site, and I have a few observations.
I didn't "optimize" my laptop before running the benchmark. I didn't have Thunderbird running but other than that nothing was disabled, including the wallpaper cycling program I wrote, which changed the wallpaper twice during the render.
I use Everest Ultimate to monitor chip temperatures, and it also give me a nice per-core utilization feed in real time. Watching the render, I would have expected 100% on all four cores the entire time. For the most part all four cores were at 100% but at random times all four would dip down to around 80%, with no other process visibly doing anything.
The most surprising observation to me was at the end of the render, when only the last bit of the grass population was being rendered on top of the already rendered terrain. NONE of the cpu cores was above 50%, but two of them were up between 45% and 50%. What I expected to see was the first core around 20%, the 2nd and 3rd around 3%, and the fourth at 100%. Interesting!!
Also, I'm very happy to see that my 6 month old laptop will hold it's own for a while to come, even against the new procs. yay!
Rich Allen
(Ricowan)