[Mordy Gilden]

You should only know how much work I went through to get a PC that did NOT have VISTA!!
It is not selling as well as they had hoped, so it appears that they are cramming it down the thoughts of OEMs.

Truthfully, Vista’s eye candy is great, but when rendering you want the OS that isn’t as flashy and therefore doesn’t require as much CPU and memory resources for doing regular tasks. XP isn’t as flashy as Vista, but that means you can actually do reasonable things on your PC without disturbing the render time. Even with all of vista’s enhancements off, it still uses more resources than XP.
And don’t even get me started with hardware device drivers…

Stay clear for now.

[Mordy Gilden]

According to many real-world tests that I’ve seen, the E6400 is just slightly behind the 6600 for speed. Each of the Core 2 Duo chips are slightly faster than the one beneath it, however all of them (the E6xxx series at least) appear to be in the same ballpark.

Whatever the case may be, I agree with you that even with non-optimized code, it should still be way ahead of my older Athlon system, or at least I would think so.
Did I mention may old chip wasn’t even a 64 model? Yeah, it was the older Athlon XP 3200+, the one that pre-dated the Athlon 64 series. I bought it in 2004, but it was already dropping in price because they were clearing shelves for the 64’s. Most of the tests in that forum you linked to are conducted with the 64. The difference should be even more dramatic for me(I guess similar to your 2500+ vs E6600).

I tried doing that render again and opened up my process manager. It seems that, as speculated, only about 50% of my CPU is being used, even when the thread priority is raised.
This is very annoying. The computer responds faster overall than my Athlon which is nice, but I bought this to speed up rendering time specifically, and that seems to fail to benefit me.

I’m going to try and see if I can install at least a trial version of Vegas 6 to see how much of a difference “optomized code” really makes here.

[Mordy Gilden]

Yes, I thought I read that somewhere as well.
So, as far as I understand it, that would mean that Vegas 6 would be faster than Vegas 5 on a dual-core system because of the optimized code. So that explains why the difference isn’t as dramatic as it could be.
However, that doesn’t explain why it would be slower. My new Core 2 Duo is still faster at just plain number crunching than the older AMD chip according to various benchmarking.
So, even without “optimized code”, it should still outperform the 3 year old CPU at least a little bit.

I read regarding other software (some 3D graphics packages) that having hyperthreading and dual core CPU’s can confuse software not designed for it, and it will use a less-efficient instruction set and task threading. In those cases, they said it is better to disable hyperthreading so that both Cores are utilized instead of the HT on a single core. I guess what I’m looking for is perhaps something similar in Vegas.
Perhaps I’m wrong about how I understand this.