Windows 7 Performance Guide
by Ryan Smith and Gary Key on October 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Networking
For our networking tests we utilize a Promise SmartStor NS4600 NAS unit equipped with two WD Caviar Black 640GB drives in RAID 1 operation. We are using our standard large folder and perform a copy from the NAS and then back to the NAS. The Promise NAS unit is connected to each test platform via a NetGear Gigabit Ethernet switch. We left all settings at their defaults on both the motherboard and Promise NAS unit. Our goal was to maximize the performance of the NAS unit to verify our network throughput capabilities in each operating system.
In our download test, Win7 is blazing fast with a 25% advantage over XP and 34% over Vista, making this result particularly notable since network file copy performance has always been a bit of a laggard on Vista. The results are very close in our upload test with Win7 and Vista basically tied and 16% ahead of XP.
USB / FireWire Performance
Our USB transfer speed tests are conducted with an USB 2.0/FireWire based Lacie external hard drive unit featuring a 1TB 7200rpm Samsung F1 drive. In the SSD to External test, we transfer a 3.82GB folder containing 2735 files of various sizes from our Kingston 80GB SSD to the Lacie drive. In the next two file tests, we use the same 3.82GB folder to transfer from our WD VRaptor 300GB hard drive to the external Lacie drive utilizing the USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394a interface.
Win7 and XP perform similarly in our USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394a tests with both finishing ahead of Vista.
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Griswold - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and...">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and...samspqr - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I agree that you have a point, the comparisons are made by humble users with the hardware we have around and limited time and resources, so they can't be as rigorous as what you'd find in a site like anandtechBUT we're testing something that is interesting and rarely tested, and we're getting some real results saying one should stick to XP in an opengl workstation
I definitely don't think it is FUD
(in particular, in the first link drivers were different in XP and w7, but each of them is the best driver you can use in that platform, so I still think it's a fair comparison, in whick XP came 20% ahead; and the 200% difference between XP and vista in the second link is just breathtaking)
B3an - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
No, you're spreading FUD. I've never seen anything like that from anyone, or on any quality tech sites.I use Win7 + Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave and others, and it's faster than XP. Period. Theres no comparison between Win7 and a decade old OS.
chrnochime - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Who cares if you run it faster on 7. Plenty of people well majority of those who buy HP/Dell/Acer etc just surf, do twittering/facebook/work on word/excel/powerpoint/outlook. What makes it faster to run the bloated office 2k7+ apps on 7 than office2k3 on xp? Oh that's right they're barely faster, even slower in some comparison.B3an - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
Wow, most people dont do 3D rendering?? who would have thought! amazing.If you actually bothered to read above, i was replying to a comment about 3D rendering software, you idiot.
samspqr - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - link
mmm... interesting...would you care coming around here and runing MayaCarBench?
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=307466">http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=307466
thanks
samspqr - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
he didn't, but we got some further results showing xp.64 to be 20% faster than w7.64, on the same hardware and with comparable drivers, for maya viewport performance:http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=307873">http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=307873