hi, im recently installed linux mint alongside win7 and made a little render speed comparison on my machine (intel core duo, cpu rendering). opened the same scene with same settings under windows and linux, but i cannot understand why is rendering under linux so much faster, can anyone explain that please?
The bottom line is that Linux is simply more efficient than Windows. It has to be, considering that it has to run on everything from a router to a supercomputer. Windows is designed to have every feature you could possibly ever need right out of the box, where Linux is designed to be lightweight and modular. This modular designs leads to a more efficient system, with far less clock cycles being used up by features that you don't need.
Benchmarking with GPU acceleration would be more interesting imho. I'm a little bit suprised that the difference is so remarkable, though.