In the Lab: Gordon Mah Ung Introduces New System Benchmarks

Posted 12/08/2007 at 6:07pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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How the New Zero-Point Stacks Up

Windows XP isn’t going away, so our new benchmark suite supports both OSes, but the speed differences are surprising.

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows Vista Ultimate machine using a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX videocards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU.

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP Professional machine using a quad-core 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800 RAM on an EVGA 680 SLI motherboard, two EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX videocards in SLI mode, Western Digital 150GB Raptor and 500GB Caviar hard drives, an LG GGC-H20L optical drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad PSU.

We selected all of our benchmarks because they run on both Windows Vista and Windows XP Professional. As performance hounds, we lean toward Windows XP Professional, so we considered running our benchmarks in XP and simply comparing Vista-only machines that we receive on the same scale. After lengthy debate, we decided that would be unfair, so our zero-point is a dual-boot system with Windows XP Professional SP2 and Windows Vista. We ran the benchmarks on each OS independently.

Wonder why enthusiasts are skipping Vista? Look at our benchmark chart. Vista performance generally dragged behind XP except in two tests: FEAR and MainConcept. We were particularly surprised by FEAR. Vista drivers have been horrible since launch, but apparently Nvidia has finally turned a performance corner.

There’s no such speed increase elsewhere, though. ProShow Producer showed a 14 percent performance decrease in Vista, and Photoshop was about 8 percent slower. OpenGL performance was atrocious in Vista, as well, with Quake 4 scores about 18 percent slower than XP’s. Ouch.

How does the new zero-point stack up against a high-end machine? You can read December’s system review for details, but a faster CPU, RAID 0, and faster graphics cards amounted to as much as a 50 percent increase in performance.

Our zero-point machine is not intended to best the machines we review but to provide a frame of reference for readers who wonder just how fast a 4GHz Penryn is compared to what’s in their own rigs.