Daft newbie question: active_record vs standard mysql query

[eluser]edjon2000[/eluser]
First of all I would like to wish you seasons greetings,

I have recently been playing about with CI's active record class, mainly due to a problem I was having with an ongoing project, whereas before, I was using standard MySQL type queries because this was what I was familiar with, however it seems to me that using CI's active_record class generates faster results, has anyone actually put this to the test? I kind of thought that the processing overhead would have yielded slower results but active_record seems to respond quicker.

Has anyone any thoughts on this point?

Jon