Gautam Out To Find Perfect OS
HWBot members who regularly browse through and participate in threads on the XtremeSystems forum probably already know Gautam, the fierce, harsh and ultra-strict moderator. However, next to cleaning up threads on the forums, he also shows quite the interest in benchmarking … or, to be closer to the truth: he’s addicted to it. In an article released today on the front-end website of the forums, overclockers.com, Gautam tries out 8 different operating systems in an attempt to find the golden combination for 6 benchmarks.
In contrary to what I would expect, XP is quite bad in a lot of benchmarks, probably because the graphics card drivers are becoming more and more optimized for Vista and Windows 7. Also surprising is the advantage of XP over Vista for Wprime, whereas a lot of users prefer do it the other way around. Most certainly an interesting read for those who want to get the absolute most out of their configuration!
Example graph
(source: overclockers.com)
Excerpt from article
“So, who is the winner? Well, if you’ve scrolled to skip past the graphs, every single benchmark has a unique operating system that does best. Overall, the two most solid performers are Server 2008 32 and Vista 32. Both of these are at the top for the 3D benchmarks, and fare okay in the 2D benchmarks as well. Deserving of flak in every day usage or not, in benchmarks, Vista 32 performs very well. Contrary to popular belief, XP and 7’s supposed “lightness†does not really translate in benchmarks. In fact, the more CPU-centric a benchmark is, the worse 7 tends to do. The only thing XP remains good for are 2D benchmarks, falling far behind the pack in all things 3D. Once again, this article only sets out to show which the fastest operating systems are by the numbers. The fastest choice might not necessarily be the best one for you.”
Discuss
Link to source: http://www.overclockers.com/windows-showdown-8-operating-systems-6-benchmarks/
Gautam Out To Find Perfect OS
On Core 2 I agree Vista is faster, but on i7 nope. Check out the fastest wprime 32m Bloomfield scores on hwbot and see for yourself. 
