Yeah I don’t know… if its faster that way, then who am I to argue.
The oldest hardware I’ve tried plotting with is a 6600k. Results can be seen here:
In that experiment the SSD was the bottleneck and the CPU wasn’t being utilized all that much because of the restrictions caused by the SSD. When I put an NVME drive in it the CPU ran full-throttle and I was getting 2 hour plots with madmax,
If your CPU is maxed out under madmax, then your only option really is to upgrade.
Its really just a game of finding out where the bottleneck in the system is, and making upgrades to remove the bottleneck for better throughput.