Render time weirdness

khobar95_aca528e7cf

I've been concerned about how long it takes my system to render a scene and was looking to upgrade - actually left the house this morning to go get a new CPU/mb but turned around and decided I should do more research.

I came across this thread - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/12065/ and decided to try the Fairy render. My system took somewhere around an hour.

For grins I ran the same render on my wife's Dell and her system completed in 12m25s. What????

My system uses an Intel 3110 Xeon (3GHz) w/8GB RAM and Windows 7 HP 64-bit.
Her system uses an Intel 6420 C2D (2.13GHz) w/2GB RAM and Windows XP 32-bit

She has a 10K hard drive and Nvidia 8400GS while mine has a "regular" hd and an ATi X1950Pro video.

Thoughts???

Edit: I pulled the USB wifi dongle and Fairy render time plunged drastically. Am now running some tests to try to determine why. Weird...