macbook pro in boot camp renders considerably faster than Q6600 desktop
 

One thing has had me scratching my head for the past year or so. It seems that regardless of whether I'm using Vegas Pro 8.x or 9.x, my macbook pro (running boot camp) renders projects significantly quicker (like 2 to 3 times quicker) than my quad core desktop machine. The majority of the time, I'm rendering out to H.264 MP4 using the Mainconcept codec. For a while I thought maybe it was something peculiar to the windows installation on my desktop machine but I have actually tried it with several different OS installations on the same machine (which has 8GB of RAM, a 10k rpm Velociraptor system drive and 3 1.5TB 7200 rpm data drives)

my macbook pro has a 500GB 7200 rpm system drive and 2GB of ram. It's one of the first core 2 duo models (2.33 GHz) so it is several years old. Any ideas?

No ideas here... but I am curious as to what Win OS you're using on these various installs?

For one, thing a number of project related factors can affect the render time, such as effects.
One other thing is memory settings and memory availability can also definitely affect your render time.

Ive said this before, check if Ram preview is enabled on your desktop, if so, turn it off in options b4 you render. It is the single biggest render killer in vegas.

I will check that, thanks. Over the past 18 months, I have done several clean installs in pursuit of the difference so I assumed that the default settings would be the same on both machines.

To answer some of the other questions, I have tried rendering the exact same project on both machines, and that's where I've observed the significantly better performance on my macbook. Not really what I expected.

As for the head to head comparisons, the OS in question was XP Professional initially, and later, Windows 7 Professional. Same difference either way. Right now I have Windows 7 Professional 64-bit running on the desktop machine and Windows 7 Professional 32-bit running on the macbook pro.

I will check the RAM preview thing.

Actually, turning off RAM preview in Vegas will force single-threaded-only rendering. This will kill your rendering performance even more.

The recommendation I usually see is to drop it down to a low number like 128.

no disrespect intended Randall, but i must have a different Vegas than you.
Ram preview set to 0 on mine gives me minimal ram usage while rendering, and 8 cores running consistantly between 50 and 75% for the entire render.
but....
having ram preview enabled is fine if your only rendering a few sec of footage or fx, however, if rendering anything over a min or so you will watch your ram usage go up and up until it chokes and slows your render down to a crawl so bad it will make a Commodore 64 look like a speed demon.
Open task manager and see for yourself.

I tried this on my 64-bit 9.0c, and found that turning RAM preview to 0 actually reduced CPU utilization from 40-ish down to 20-ish% on my system. In fact, I got faster results with the RAM preview set at its default 350MB than I did at 0. (This was with the Sony AVC encoder; I found no difference in CPU utilization when I rendered to 1080i MPEG-2.)

By the way, which version of Vegas are you running? And what video format are you rendering to?

I also tried the MainConcept AVC encoder, and found no difference in the CPU utilization regardless of the RAM preview setting.

Maybe I'll try a longer render, and see what happens...

I would not turn ram down to 0. Instead, just use a very small number (maybe 16?). There ARE cases where rendering will go tremendously slower when set to 0 where even a very small value will bring it back up to speed.