fc5 X performance is a mess!

My gpu is an nvidia geforce 5200, my machine is Athlon XP2800+ with 1GB PC3200 RAM on an Asus Board - short: my machine is very fast. I haven't installed any proprietary drivers from nvidia yet, since the kernel still refuses to load non-gpl modules and because nvidia's installer doesn't work properly with FC5.

Normal work on the desktop with both gnome and kde results in almost 100% CPU usage all the time. The last time when I had such a slow GUI was, when I ran FC4 on a 300Mhz Pentium II. Browsing simple pages with maximized windows (for example: http://www.canon.de/For_Home/Product_Finder/Cameras/Digital_SLR/index.asp?ComponentID=164045&SourcePageID=26009#2 ) even locks up my whole desktop for seconds.

Top shows me that it's the X Server that eats up all my CPU.
The CPU usage is even that high, that the bandwidth of my dialup connection shrinks to a tenth of the normal rate while the X-server is calculating.

It's not only browsing the web. The whole desktop is much slower then before. Another example is the gnome-terminal. Actually it's not the gnome-terminal that eat's the cpu but the X-Server again. Anyway, when compiling things an a remote machine (via ssh) the X-Server consumes my whole CPU only because gnome-terminal requests to paint one line every tenth second. The remote machine compiles faster then my machine can paint the output!! A workaround is placing another window over the gnome-terminal. The CPU usage goes down to almost zero in this case.

Another strange thing is that I cannot always reproduce this behaviour. Sometimes things go fast sometimes my machine seems to have locked up for seconds.

Can you confirm this? In my case it's that bad, that I am going to delay an upgrade from FC3 to FC5 of about 50 Client machines. The GUI is in fact not usable!

What could be the reason for this? Is it the new cairo library in gnome?

thanks for hint!

greets Boris

P.s. There's one thing concerning performance, that I appreciate very much: it's the startup time for gnome. It's almost as fast as xfce!!

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