Computer upgrade, benchmarking.

Seems every 2/3 years a computer upgrade is needed. My rendering using 3ds max, maya etc is getting so slow on my hp pavilion dv6000 laptop - amd64 turon processor. So on black friday 2008, l headed to newegg.com, fry's etc and built myself a Quad-core 8200 Intel based new PC, with a Cooler Master Elite case, 550W power supply unit, 8Gb DDR2/800 ram - the board MSI P45 neo3 supports 16Gb, Geoforce 9400GT etc. Total cost about $950
Heres my benchmark comparison using 3dmark06 free version.
My previous home PC, a Intel duo E330 1.6Ghz with 2Gb got a score of about 220
My new PC got a score of about 3300
A baseline top-of-the-line overclocked Intel Extreme processor based machine, rates about 33,000! Bummer!

Using povray 3.6.1c l got:
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2.33Ghz Intel Quad-core 8Gb RAM 145.71 PPS
1.8Ghz Intel Dual-core 2Gb RAM 101.79 PPS [my older PC]

From the POV-Ray help contents:
In case you are interested, here are the results the author of POV-Ray for Windows got on the two machines on which he ran the benchmark v1.01 on (note that this was with POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 final release).
The operating system in both cases was Windows 2000 SP2.
2.0 GHz Intel Pentium™ 4256 MB RDRAM 54.04 PPS
1.4 GHz AMD Athlon™1024 MB DDR RAM 53.11 PPS