Sounds pretty normal to me. Performance tends to be very inconsistent. Using 0.8.22 R7, I noticed a huge LOSS in performance when I switched from an Athlon 1600+ and a VIA chipset to an Athlon 2600+ and an nForce2 chipset. Now on my P4, I seem to get performance just in-between.
Of course, this is with JIT turned off and running OCS games. If I turn on JIT, Workbench goes berserk and I can't double-click any icons. Running AIAB, the machine is ultra-fast and I have no trouble, though it has brought down Win2K very hard on occasion. I've never seen anything other than flakey freeware games do that.
Isn't emulation great? ;-)