Q6600 vs P8600 with SQL query - laptop wins?

[blackfrancis75]

I currently have two rigs for software development; a desktop and a laptop;

Desktop - Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 w/ 4GB@667MHz running OSX 10.5.4
Laptop - Intel Core2 Duo P8600 w/ 3GB; IBM Thinkpad running WinXP sp 3.
Both have 7200rpm drives.
Looking at the specs, both processors have a base frequency of 2.4 GHz.

I have an SQL query that I run on both machines with Postgres 8.3 installed.

Desktop - average execution time: 117s
Laptop - average execution time: 51s

Can anyone offer insight as to why (in terms of hardware) the laptop might take less than half as long to execute the query?

 

[blackfrancis75]

I'm not an Apple fanboi by any means, but I find that really surprising. In my experience XP is far less reliable and more buggy and so I guess my perception was that it would also be less efficient. Anyone else concur?

 

[warmon6]

I currently have two rigs for software development; a desktop and a laptop;

Desktop - Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 w/ 4GB@667MHz running OSX 10.5.4
Laptop - Intel Core2 Duo P8600 w/ 3GB; IBM Thinkpad running WinXP sp 3.
Both have 7200rpm drives.
Looking at the specs, both processors have a base frequency of 2.4 GHz.

I have an SQL query that I run on both machines with Postgres 8.3 installed.

Desktop - average execution time: 117s
Laptop - average execution time: 51s

Can anyone offer insight as to why (in terms of hardware) the laptop might take less than half as long to execute the query?

I'm not an Apple fanboi by any means, but I find that really surprising. In my experience XP is far less reliable and more buggy and so I guess my perception was that it would also be less efficient. Anyone else concur?

Maybe the HDD or ram speed. How old is the desktop and laptop. Also whats the speed of the ram on the laptop?

if there an old HDD in the desktop then maybe that what causing the problem. As HDD get's move advance a slower rpm but newer hdd can match an older and slower rpm hdd. Example:

My desktop has HDD 7200 RPM drive and It runs 50 Megabytes a sec on read.

A few laptop i have running around here that are 2/3 years old (except 1) and all of them are 5400 rpm drives. They all read (except 1) at 50 MBs as well. The 1 that doesn't read at 50MB's reads at like 60 mbs a second.

If it isn't the HDD causing the difference and maybe the ram. You didn't post the ram speed for the laptop but if it's faster like 800 MHz then that will make things run faster.