Vista: 32-bit vs. 64-bit & RTM vs. SP1
To augment the benchmarking of Vista 32-bit versus Vista 64-bit that I carried out the other day I decided to run a few additional benchmarks to see which platform really is the fastest. The results are quite interesting.
The Test System
- Phenom 9700 quad-core processor
- ATi Radeon 3850 graphics card with 256MB RAM
- ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard
- 2GB (2 x 1GB) Corsair Dominator CM2X1024-8500C5D RAM
- Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM 150GB primary hard drive
- Western Digital Caviar 7,200RPM 500GB secondary hard drive
Each system was fully patched with all patches available from Windows Update.
Other noteworthy points:
- The only driver installed was the graphics card driver - Catalyst 8.2.
- No optimizations were carried out other than to process idle tasks and defrag the hard drive between each test.
- Windows Defender was left on for all tests.
- The Microsoft SP1 testing guidelines document was followed closely.
The Tests
This time we’re going to use two synthetic benchmark:
- PCMark Vantage
- CINEBENCH R10
Note: With both of these benchmarks, the higher the number, the better the score.
On the 64-bit platform, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the benchmarks were run.
Each test was run four times and the lowest score from each run was discarded. The remaining results were then averaged to produced a final score.
The Results
Conclusions
The results from this set of benchmark runs have turned out to be quite clear.
- In all the 64-bit tests (PCMark Vantage and CINEBENCH R10), Vista 64-bit RTM beat Vista 64-bit SP1.
- Vista 64-bit RTM also got the top spot on the PCMark Vantage 32-bit benchmark too, with Vista 32-bit RTM coming second, Vista 32-bit SP1 third and Vista 64-bit SP1 coming in forth.
- In most of the CINEBENCH R10 32-bit tests, Vista 32-bit RTM came in first and Vista 64-bit RTM came in second, Vista 32-bit SP1 came in third and Vista 64-bit SP1 came in third.
- All of the systems showed a decline in benchmark scores after installing SP1.
Speed demons might want to hold out on SP1 for a while - there may well be some new performance enhancing updates released later.
Next week I'll look at gaming and see how performance is affected there, and in case your head is spinning from all the benchmarks, I'll do a post that pulls all the data together.
Thoughts?