Well I rebuilt the same os configuration on an older piece of hardware yesterday, not much older but the last generation of Intel chips (Core2), the later OS etc seemed to make a difference. Well lets put it this way it shaved a good 10 minutes off the same build as on the i5..

Just need to get em to parallellise the build process so that it will use all cores.

Just had a bit of a bombshell of news, but good in my eyes. We need to upgrade our source control system to the latest as our current version EOLs in Sep. The second bit of news carried with that was support for RHEL 6 was just introduced this weekend... This is awesome news to me as I reckon its time to knock the long planned, long stalled RHEL 5.x rollout on the head and concentrate on 6.