Windows Xp vs Vista vs 7

Windows is without a doubt the most popular operating system out there today. With the release of Windows 7 just around the corner I thought why not compare all three operating systems to each other.

I’ll start off with the specs of my system for you.
CPU: Intel Q9650 (3ghz)
RAM: 8gigs OCZ Fatal1ty PC2-6400
Motherboard: EVGA NF-680i
Video Card: Sparkle Nvidia GTX260 (896mb ram) –Main Monitor 22” 1680×1050 Res
Video Card2: EVGA 8600GTS (for PhysX)
Video Card2: ECS Nvidia GTS250 –Dual 20” 1680×1050 Res
The operating systems are:
Vista Ultimate 64bit
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Windows XP 32bit
We’ll start the testing off with Crystalmark 2004R3

I like to use Crystalmark because it basically tests all aspects of the system and then also gives you an overall Mark or Score for your system that you can then compare to others.

Processor Cache and Memory
Benchmark the processors’ caches and memory access (transfer speed).

Results Interpretation:
Cache/Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster memory bandwidth.

Speed Factor (MB/s) – lower results are better, i.e. less difference between processor cache speed and memory speed.

Combined Index: is a composite figure representing the overall performance rating of the entire Cache-Memory performance in terms of MB/s. The value is the logarithmic average of all the results for the entire address space. (Higher is better, i.e. better performance)

Multi-Core Efficiency
Benchmark the multi-core efficiency of the processors.

The ability of the cores to process data blocks and pass them to another core for processing (producer-consumer paradigm) of different sizes and different chain sizes is measured. The efficiency of the inter-connect between cores is thus benchmarked; however, the number of cores (and processors) also counts as more data buffers can be processed simultaneously (aka "in flight").