I tried creating the reference.wav file on a pc that has an old AMD Athlon 1G cpu, then on a new laptop that has a Intel Celeron 370(1.6Ghz) cpu and also on another PC that has an Intel "Pentium 4" 2Ghz. The speed on the 1Ghz and 1.6Ghz was good, but on the P4 2Ghz is EXTREMELY SLOW! After about 6% progress the estimated time is 16 hours! The supposedly "faster" cpu was slowest.

What is going on here ? Any particular setting that I should be checking ?
If raw processor speed is not the only thing it depends upon then what makes for the difference ? Does it use a particular instruction(set) that might not be present in a certain cpu ? Or does it depend heavily on the speed of the FSB (in case there are lots of memory<-> cpu moves) ?

"the reference.wav" file?



Were you using EAC?

Were you using the same exact drive each time?

Did you have secure mode turned on?

-brendan

I am talking about running the "CreateReference.EXE" file that will first create the initial reference.wav file, which will then get burned onto the disc.
Drive/eac/etc is not in the picture yet.

Ah. Your original post had very little context (I'm not intimately familiar with EAC's documentation webpages).

I'd suggest reading over this thread:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=20609

-brendan

I don't know exactly what you're doing, but the result does not surprise me the least. In fact, I already suspected before I actually read your post that the "faster" processor was going to be a P4. The Pentium 4 architecture was a marketing-driven misdevelopment to acieve higher clock speeds by sacrificing efficiency - many real-world applications that aren't optimised for the P4 will run faster on most any other processor.
An extreme example, my Celeron M notebook (1,4Ghz) encodes mp3 with lame at about 12x realtime. On a Pentium 4 (don't know which one) around 3,2Ghz of someone else who posted on this forum, it ran with 7x realtime until the processor overheated and throttled - then encoding slowed to 2-3x.
Also, the P4 runs hot as hell.. these problems are probably what led Intel to ditch the P4 architecture and derive their "Core"'s from the Pentium M (which was in turn derived from the P3).

(Everything stated above is just how I understand the situation. There may be mistakes, bias and whatnot)

ok so its a P4 thing. Didn't know that cpu was so bad.

as for what I am trying to do - just checking the DAE quality of the drives on those PCs/notebooks that I have access to.