2 identical machines, 1 identical scene, huge difference in Render times HELP NEEDED!

[michaelfountouklis]

Hello,

 

I am new to this forum, although i am following the work posted and the tutorials here for quite some time, and i have to say that its a great effort and it has helped me on many occasions.

 

I have a recent problem with one machine at the office were i work.

 

I am an architect and i work at an architectural firm, i am the visual artist of the office and i have quite some years of experiense. I mainly use 4 of our computers which are quite high-end, with distributed rendering. Two of them are actually almost identical in specs.

 

The computrer i am using is an Intel core i7 -3820 CPU @ 3.60 GHz

with 40GB of RAM and a graphics card of Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 2 Gb

 

The computer that i call as almost identical is the same only instead of 40 GB of RAM

it has 24 GB.

 

The past few days i noticed a drop in the Windows Experiense Index, mainly the number of CPU calculations droped from 7.7 to 6. I started running some tests, tried to update drivers, update BIOS, to a reset on BIOS and i fortmated the computer. After many efforts on the matter the WEI came back to 7.7 from 6. But then i ran some render tests with these two computers. One two IDENTICAL scenes, with identical settings (checked thoroughly) the one computer is rendering the scene on 2 minutes while the other at 5.25. Now this difference is quite noticiable, if you think what will happen if i render i final project scene that would normaly need 10-15 hours the difference then would be too great.

 

Just to make clear, all the files are loeaded localy in each test, there is no distributed rendering involved, and the machines have exactly the same plugins loaded cause i need to have them identical to use them for distributed rendering on other occasions.

 

I send the computer to the manufacturer to check the CPU but they told me it works fine to all the stress tests (such as prime95). I loaded cpu-z and CPU meter and monitored the usage during rendering and it seems to clock normaly @ 3.60 ghz with 100% speed at all times.

 

Can someone please suggest something, cause i am running out of ideas. Thank you very much

 

Michael