one for the pc hardware expert

[Sine]

OK. This one got me.
Why does my intel P4 2.4GHz pc renders slower than my AMD sempron 2600+ GHz. The AMD really gets up to only 1.83GHz but the P4 is 2.3GHz.

However, when animating, the P4 performs better as I can hear the soundtrack better when I scrub on the timeline. I suspect lousy built-in sound chip or driver is hampering the sound on the AMD pc. Otherwise it's cheaper and renders faster. Will I be correct to say that if I were to put in a better sound card and video card into the AMD pc, I can get better performance?

[Daniel Poeira]

Why does my intel P4 2.4GHz pc renders slower than my AMD sempron 2600+ GHz. The AMD really gets up to only 1.83GHz but the P4 is 2.3GHz.

In theory, a 2600 AMD is faster then a 2400 Intel. The number of GHz the processor is doing doesn't necessarily means the speed of the whole process.

There are several factors involved in the general speed of the computer. The number of GHz is not an accurate way to measure its speed.

For instance, what is the speed of your RAM memory? What is the speed of your hard drive? What about the video board? The audio board? All that can inffluence the working of the CPU.

However, when animating, the P4 performs better as I can hear the soundtrack better when I scrub on the timeline. I suspect lousy built-in sound chip or driver is hampering the sound on the AMD pc. Otherwise it's cheaper and renders faster. Will I be correct to say that if I were to put in a better sound card and video card into the AMD pc, I can get better performance?

I think so. If you were using an onboard video card you would have slower video performance too. An independent audio board would probably get the audio processing task for itself with its own memory and processor, leaving the CPU free to the other tasks.