From a hardware perspective.
Given that I apparently have no life, hence LOTS of spare time, I decided to
perform some head to head comparison tests.
Conditions identical, hardware identical, latest/greatest drivers for each OS.
XP Pro SP2.
Vista Ultimate SP1.
Both OS are fully patched/updated.
Hardware consists of:
-AMD s939 3800+ dual core
-1GB (2 x 512 MB) Patriot DDR (2,3,2,5 @1T)
-2 x 250GB Seagate SATAII in RAID0
-nVidia 6800 GT
-Creative Soundblaster X-fi
-Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
System overclocked to 2.35GHZ.
Ran all tests three times on each OS and averaged the results.
Everest memory benchmarks....
Pro:................................................Vista:
read- 6147 ......................................6080
write- 2635......................................2220
latency- 46.4....................................48.7
Pro gets the nod here, especially in the write category.
PC Pitstop
( Chosen because it's a fast, easy system comparison test not because it's especially good...)
Pro:............................................. Vista:
CPU- 1520......................................1430 ( -5.6%)
RAM- 902........................................901 ( even)
Video-322 ......................................149 ( -54%)
HDD- 264 .......................................192 ( -28%)
TOTAL- 3058..................................2722
(scores for internet performance and deductions for crap they consider detrimental were the same for both OS)
Pro wins again with Vista disturbingly worse in the video area and also HDD utilization.
Not sure what conclusions to draw from this but a couple of things seem a pretty
safe bet...
- Vista not only requires a higher hardware spec but makes worse use of the
hardware it has.
- Video performance is the most glaring discrepancy, so it's safe to assume that
gaming would suffer horribly...must be the drivers, I suspect.
I have no idea why the hard drive I/O scores in Vista are as bad as they are,
you'd think they would have that figured out by now.
Too bad I've become quite enamored of a couple of Vista's undeniable perks...the
GUI is great and the way the Sleep/Hibernate works is ace.
Unfortunately, I'm thinking these aren't enough to justify the losses,
especially with my (comparatively) weak hardware specs.
If I get ambitious (i.e.,even more bored), I might compare the 32 v 64 bit versions of
Pro and see what happens.
Maybe even get Ubuntu in there if I can figure out how...
Just thought I'd share.
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