February 12th, 2008
Some systems showing incredible SP1 performance boost - Day 6
[UPDATE: Mark Russinovich (Technical Fellow in the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft) emailed in to point out that he's written a detailed post on his blog explaining the reasons behind some of these dramatic improvements. Thanks Mark!]
Some systems on which I’ve installed Windows Vista SP1 are showing significant performance gains.
One system in particular where I’m seeing a significant gain is the AMD Phenom/Spider system which I have in the lab.
For the record, here’s the spec of that system:
- Phenom 9700 quad-core processor
- ATi Radeon 3850 graphics card with 256MB RAM
- ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard
- 2GB (2 x 1GB) Corsair Dominator CM2X1024-8500C5D RAM
- Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM 150GB primary hard drive
- Western Digital Caviar 7,200RPM 500GB secondary hard drive
The other day I carried out some file transfer benchmarks on this system with Vista RTM (and all the current patches) installed. After collecting the data installed SP1 and benched it again. When I compared the results I noticed some significant improvements.
For the purposes of these benchmark tests I used two different set of files to transfer:
- A single 644MB file
- A folder contains numerous files and folders (3495 files / 30 folders) totaling 5.16GB
I carried out a number of tests which consisted of moving, compressing and extracting these files. All these tasks were performed three times and the results averaged. In all but one of the tests Vista SP1 showed gains over Vista RTM, and in some tests these improvements were so significant that I reloaded the system and carried out both tests again just to check my results (and I concluded with almost identical results).
Here’s the data from these tests, first off in tabular format.
Graphs –>
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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| 02/13/08
