Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2 - Benchmarked

Some people are concerned that in order to get an accurate measurement of boot time the system needs to be booted many times. Let me assure you that the systems here under testing were rebooted more times than most normal PCs are over the course of several months.]


Over the past few days I posted two sets of benchmarks comparing Windows Vista RTM with Vista SP1 (first post here, second here). These posts generated a lot of feedback, and from reading this feedback it’s clear that what many people are really interested in is not the performance differences between Vista RTM and Vista SP1, but between Vista SP1 and XP SP2.

A few days ago I posted in reply to several TalkBack comments that I wouldn’t carry out these tests until XP SP3 is released. There didn’t seem any point. That didn’t satisfy the crowds who wanted to see Vista SP1 and XP SP2 go head to head. So, to cut a long story short, the pestering continued and I eventually gave in. So what follows are the fruits of nearly two whole days of work at the PC Doc HQ (the test was hampered by the death of a motherboard, something which rendered hours of work obsolete).

How does Windows Vista SP1 compare to Windows XP SP2?

Conclusions and Caveats

Note: I didn’t benchmark against XP SP3 because the EULA prevents the disclosure of benchmark results. Also, since it’s a beta, things can change between now and the final release.

So, onto conclusions. Looking at the data there’s only one conclusion that can be drawn - Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows Vista SP1. End of story. Out of the fifteen tests carried out, XP SP2 beat Vista SP1 in eleven, Vista SP1 beat XP SP2 in two of the tests, and two of the tests resulted in a draw.

The best result for Vista SP1 was in the single file drive-to-drive copy, while the best result for XP SP2 was extracting multiple files from a compressed folder. Given these results and taking into account the improvments that SP1 bought to Vista, if I was to go back and compare XP SP2 with Vista RTM, XP would have hammered Vista even harder.

Reminder: These results apply to a single system and no optimizations were carried out to any of the systems. Your mileage can, and probably will, vary.

I’ll carry out some gaming benchmarks over the next few days. Watch this space!

source: blogs.zdnet.com



Related Posts by Categories



Widget by Hoctro

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Followers



Source Code

Tips