Benchmarking Windows 7: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

[techpops]

You can get a little freeware tool called standalonestack which adds the osx like program grouping. Works very well.

Right now on my 1680x display I have 20 large icons on the taskbar and 4 different open apps. There appears to be enough space for another 6 or 7 running programs. I can't think of a time when I'd need to run 10 apps at once but I'm sure some would. Still for most its way more than enough and certainly better than any other system I've ever come across. The taskbar is easily my favourite thing about 7 at the moment. I hope I'm not further hyping it, it just feels much more useful to me than XP's and the heaps of little touches in the GUI are still making me smile.

You could use a two column taskbar for double the icon space or use other program launchers. I'm using two others. Nexus and Objectdock, also Stardocks fences. All of them together are a one click dream to launch everything I need from day to day.

 

[4voc]

What the Heck is Vista?
that expensive box i tossed in the trash a few years ago?

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]4voc[/nom]What the Heck is Vista?that expensive box i tossed in the trash a few years ago?[/citation]

From the teams HARDWARE REVIEW perspective, Vista was the method to support DX10 and, now that we've figured out the workaround, DX11. Since there IS a workaround to install DX11 on Vista, the big question is why to switch to 7. The answer is...because many readers will favor 7 over Vista. But why, when it doesn't benchmark faster? The answer is...because it benchmarks quicker, not faster, it's all about responsiveness.

Like I said, I don't personally care about that stuff, my system runs DX9 and I'm happy with it. But when I test hardware, I have to test it with DX10 or soon DX11.

 

[twanto]

I'm always befuddled by articles from Tom's hardware where they have a sample size of n=1 for some comparison and go on to discuss how 0.5-1 fps (or whatever benchmark) difference is in any way meaningful.

 

[Guest]

Comparison with Windows XP is a must! There is no option here: Include XP. Simple as that.

I was very surprised to see that this test didn't included Windows XP.

Why on earth is that? I don't wanna speculate, I just say it one more more time:

Include Windows XP in the test. Otherwise this test will be looked upon by almost all your readers as very biased and flawed.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]GamerInDisguise[/nom]I just say it one more more time:Include Windows XP in the test. Otherwise this test will be looked upon by almost all your readers as very biased and flawed.[/citation]

To include Windows XP and test under DX9 would be biased and flawed.

 

[Guest]

Windows XP still own!!! untill you need more than 3gb of ram (1% of the population maybe?) !!!

 

[wintermint]

Lets just wait until newer applications come out that will appreciate Window 7 then we'll begin to see some positive shifts

 

[overshocks]

[citation][nom]wintermint[/nom]Lets just wait until newer applications come out that will appreciate Window 7 then we'll begin to see some positive shifts[/citation]

No, more like 1% times 20 = 20%

 

[Guest]

@ Crashman 10/27/2009 12:15 PM
"To include Windows XP and test under DX9 would be biased and flawed"

Why? Well, it can't be too difficult or time consuming to include a few DX9 runs on all three OS's - Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 - can it? Or would a DX9 application in some way reduce or enhance the performance if being run under DX10 or DX11?

And if it is too difficult, for some reason unbeknownst to me, please, include at least those tests that are not DX-dependent - for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

 

[Guest]

If that Anand article is true ATI/AMD will have the highend segment under control indefinitely. Mmh, anyone wager the Intel GPU will have any kick? I doubt it seeing how sadly their IGPs perform against Nvidia's saddening lineup of onboard graphics. Looks like AMD might be able to turn a pretty good profit from their ATI branch. Maybe even some more funding for improved CPU architecture and 8 core CPUs in the near future?

 

[jsmooth]

What I would like to see is the tweak test. Who runs their system on fresh installs? I tweak the heck out of XP and given same hardware I'll go against any vista\vista sp3 (win 7) box out there in any usability test. That would be much more interesting. My mom does not read THG. I do.

 

[jsmooth]

What I would like to see is the tweak test. Who runs their system on fresh installs? I tweak the heck out of XP and given same hardware I'll go against any vista\vista sp3 (win 7) box out there in any usability test. That would be much more interesting. My mom does not read THG. I do.

 

[gian84]

They should have compared vista sp2 with win7.

 

[gian84]

they should have compared vista sp2 with win7 and xp sp3.

 

[Guest]

Hey

What I am really interested in is how does windows 7 performs on my core2duo machine. Preferably compared to windows xp.

 

[PLATTERMAN]

My Best Buy's pre order of Win 7 upgrade i just got today in the mail. I have a Q9450,8800GT,Vista 32 bit,8GB of memory to go to 64 bit Windows 7 with a clean install not so sure if i want to now. I do alot video encoding of HD video 720 and 1080 and dvd video as well. I don't have any pc games at all. Vista 32bit has given me no problems i got it last July after sp1 now sp2 with sp3 due out soon. I guess i am in a holding pattern.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]PLATTERMAN[/nom]My Best Buy's pre order of Win 7 upgrade i just got today in the mail. I have a Q9450,8800GT,Vista 32 bit,8GB of memory to go to 64 bit Windows 7 with a clean install not so sure if i want to now. I do alot video encoding of HD video 720 and 1080 and dvd video as well. I don't have any pc games at all. Vista 32bit has given me no problems i got it last July after sp1 now sp2 with sp3 due out soon. I guess i am in a holding pattern.[/citation]

That's a fine position to take. The article was intended to cover the performance aspects of Windows 7 from a benchmarker's point of view, and showed that program performance typically doesn't improve.

 

[Guest]

I would Say on a normal or old machines the results are obvious than using a very efficient and new system try it on single Core machines the results are impressive.

 

[Guest]

This is so hilarious. The benchmarks say Vista = 7. But is FEELS faster. Steve Balmer appears to have borrowed Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.

 

[Guest]

The only thing that the benchmark is close with both of the OS because of the system is already a direct memory access with it's processor Intel's i7 why not try it on older systems that would really show the real power of Windows 7, Single and Dual cores Using DDR2 memory. Not all users have the i7 with DDR3. and also with 10k rpm hard drive.

 

[arrigob]

I love it. I use computers for 75% of my day and I have been using Windows 7 since beta. I prefer Windows 7. I only use computers for work and internet surfing. And it seems faster than the past two based on the what I use it for.

One thing I am happy to report. For the first time ever using a Windows product, I didn't have to install a single driver when the install was finished. It actually found my printer driver which xp or vista never did.

If you are like most of America and love to see things fail or if you just like to be an elitist and nothing ever suits you, then you will probably hate Windows 7. But try and be opened minded about it, at least its not OS X.

Also tell me one Windows operating system that was totally stable from the first release? But they are great after that 2nd or 3rd service pack (like XP).

 

[arrigob]

[citation][nom]PLATTERMAN[/nom]My Best Buy's pre order of Win 7 upgrade i just got today in the mail. I have a Q9450,8800GT,Vista 32 bit,8GB of memory to go to 64 bit Windows 7 with a clean install not so sure if i want to now. I do alot video encoding of HD video 720 and 1080 and dvd video as well. I don't have any pc games at all. Vista 32bit has given me no problems i got it last July after sp1 now sp2 with sp3 due out soon. I guess i am in a holding pattern.[/citation]

I hope that you were not meaning that you run 8GB RAM on a 32 bit vista. Did you?

 

[maxpain12]

It's pretty odd that Windows XP was not included given that most techy types that visit this site still use XP. Don't know about some folks but Win 7 loads faster than XP for me and there is noticeably less hard drive activity. Using the same hardware as with XP. It does have its quirks though it mostly could be attributed to incompatibilities in third party software, like my Winamp media library loads slower and Allways Sync gives strange "access denied" errors for some folders. Like mentioned beforehand this article should not be taken into serious consideration as the final impression rests with how the OS responds to the users requirements. For example going from XP to Win 7 does not have a noticeable impact on frames per second but Fallout 3 looks amazing on the same settings when compared with venerable XP. Overall better lighting and shading effects. My Specs Core 2 E4600, 4G Ram, Gforce 9800GT and X-fi Titanium.

 

[The-Darkening]

[citation][nom]Intel_Hydralisk[/nom]I'm confused as to why the results in this article are different than the ones at Anand. For example, at Anand, Win 7 was faster in the Winrar compression test than Vista. This is not so at Tom's. Could it just be that the differences aren't statistically significant and it's simple variance?[/citation]

Anand compresses docs and txts. Toms compresses pr0n