Comments on: Vista vs XP performance: some informal tests

By: Jeremy Morrison

Jeremy Morrison — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:46:36 +0000

SP1 for Vista is supposed to make significant improvements to Vista’s speed, as reported by users of the SP1 Beta.

I’ve held off on Vista, but I’m looking forward to seeing where it’s going and plan to see the x64 version on my new desktop later this year.

By: John A Thomson

John A Thomson — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:12:52 +0000

Windows XP will be even faster with the release of Windows XP SP3. The word on the street is it makes significant performance improvements.

You’ll need to rerun those test when Vista SP1 and XP SP3 comes out .

By: Clyde Davies

Clyde Davies — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:11:59 +0000

Fortunately, the cheaper Radeon 3850 seems to be widely available at £110 (€155). This is fantastic, as the Radeon 3850 offers similar performance to the Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb for a really low price.

Thank you for that pointer: I never knew about that site until you told me just then. I might treat myself to one of those for Xmas.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:32:40 +0000

Any recommendations?

Not sure; Toms Hardware and the like would be a good place to look.

By: Clyde Davies

Clyde Davies — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:37:42 +0000

Tim:
You can see by my box’s ratings that it’s the graphics performance that lets it down. I’m looking to get a cheap graphics card that performs well. Any recommendations?

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:17:39 +0000

@tre roth

My ratings are lowly compared to yours:

Machine A: 292.6
Machine B: 368.1
Machine C: 535.5

(All Vista figures).

That said, they are quite usable. Machine C is only 1 year old – same as Vista.

What about the proposition that Vista’s performance will best XP on high-end hardware? It’s possible. Interesting though to see the PassMark fastest ten machines tested:

http://www.passmark.com/baselines/topten.php

The current record holder (score 2641) is running XP32. All the others in the top 10 are running either XP32, or Vista64.

64-bit – now, there’s another thing.

Tim

By: tre roth

tre roth — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:35:39 +0000

Hello,
What was your actual score from performace test 6.1?
With my outlook / AVG / desktop sidebar / browsing the internet (several instances) / etc… all running (computer not rebooted) – I scored a 1873.8 – overall – without all that stuff running I scored a 1919.3!! – It is hard to get a feel for how this compares to you and your test results. you simply state percentages – but no actual numbers. – you also do not appear to use any good / new hardware.

By: I.P Nichols

I.P Nichols — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 02:51:23 +0000

Tim – Remeber about a year ago when Vista was released a lot of time was spent on testing and most objective tests found that XP was faster on some tasks and slower on others and overall Vista was more-or-less as fast as XP or at worst slightly (~10%) slower. There were some tasks that were incredibility slow on Vista which will be addressed in SP1 if not already fixed by online updates.

For an excellent user experence IMO Vista hardware should be as least as good as your #3 computer. YMMV…

By: Clyde Davies

Clyde Davies — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 18:31:38 +0000

People don’t generally care about performance unless something is slow.

It doesn’t matter to me very much at all. The most irksome feature of Vista I have found lately has been the inability to recognise when updates have been applied: KB941649 has been a bloody nightmare.

By: Tim

Tim — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 15:48:26 +0000

I’m very pleased with Vista’s overall performance.

It might nevertheless be slower than XP on the same hardware. The question about how much this matters is another thing. People don’t generally care about performance unless something is slow.

Tim