like i think i mentioned before elsewhere, a quatro is not going to out-muscle a high end fx card. its designed to be more stable, and have better drivers for 3d apps. that is all.

also, your machine is a laptop. your friends is a desktop. meg for meg, a desktop will out-perform a similarly spec'ed laptop any day of the week. laptops have to be stepped down a bit, so they dont just fry.

also, your ram. not all ram is equel. your 2 gigs ram may be a much slower speed ram than your friends. in fact, considering its a dell, that is very likely.

other things to consider are, the spin rate and quality of your hard drives. and of course how well optimised your operating system is.

 

as you can see, there is a lot more to bare in mind than "this piece of hardware cost more, thus it must be faster".

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