[09.17.07] Benchmarks and Testing

1PM - Sandra and 3D Mark
After re-applying my stable overclocks, it was time to run some comparative benchmarks against my old Win XP build.

Windows XP

Sisoft Sandra 2008.1.12.34 - Memory Bandwidth:       7445
Futuremark 3DMark 2006 1.10 - Default Benchmark:  12496 

Windows Vista

Sisoft Sandra 2008.1.12.34 - Memory Bandwidth:       7346    (-1.33%)
Futuremark 3DMark 2006 1.10 - Default Benchmark:  11690   (-6.45%)

Fantastic, up to 6.5% slower than XP.  That's a nice start....

7PM - General Usage
It's been a few hours... how does vista perform under general usage?

In practice, working with files, opening programs, and normal program usage seems to work as expected.  No noticeable slow down over XP for day to day stuff.  Here's a list of some things that I found to be different.
1)  File copies.  Sometimes large file copies seemed to take longer than they did in XP.  Especially same drive copies.
2)  I'm not sure if its the 4GB of RAM or the fact that my C drive is basically 25% full at the moment, but the system overall feels a bit more "snappy" when multitasking between applications than XP did.
3)  File Columns PISS ME OFF.  It took me a bit to figure out how to make this:


...look like this:


I really don't need all of those useless "user friendly" columns that deal with multimedia files, ratings, and other bloat.  I simply want to see what size my file is, and what day it was last modified.  If you interested,  here's the steps I followed to get it this way for each of my hard drives:

- Select a folder to work with, in this case the root of the hard drive, and set your preferred view from the View Menu.  In my case, this was "Details."
- Right click on the columns to enable/disable whichever columns you prefer.
- Press the Alt key to bring up the legacy menus.  Select View >> Customize this Folder.
- On the Customize tab, select "All Items" under Use this folder as a template and check the box labeled Also apply this template to all subfolders and click OK.
- Click Organize and select "Folder and Search Options"
- Click on the View tab, and click the Apply to Folders button.
- Repeat this process for all hard drives on your system.

4) Filters in Photoshop and encodes in Premiere seem to be just as fast as XP.  That's a good sign.

9PM - Compatibility
Vista 64bit is known to be the red-headed step child of compatibility problems.  I've run into a few.

X-Fail:  First of all, let me get something out of the way.  Creative drives suck.  X-Fi drivers were shady in XP and worse in Vista.  They work about as well as a compacted wisdom tooth chews food.  Most, if not all, of my audio problems in Vista stemmed from the drivers and not the multimedia program itself.  I solved most of the issues for now.
FFXI:  Final Fantasy XI works in Vista.  Final Fantasy XI works well in vista... as long as you don't have an 8000 series card from nVidia.  Silly me for thinking a 4+ year game would work correctly on new hardware with new drivers.  There 15+ page complaint about the issue on the official nVidia forums HERE.
Temp + Voltage Monitoring:  Many popular CPU and motherboard temp monitoring proggies don't work or don't work well in Vista 64bit.  CoreTemp has issues, Everest works at random times, and even nVidia's own nTune crashed 90% of the time.  I've lucked out with Speedfan 4.33 working correctly.
Media Crasher:  Windows Media Player 11 bombs on occasion.  I'm not sure if that's due to the fact that I set the 64 bit player as default.  I'll play around with it and report back.

11:30PM - Performance
Got in an hour of Bioshock in DX10 mode, some CS: Source, MoH: Airborne multiplayer, and Enemy Territory: QuakeWars Demo.

To finally be fair, most games play a bit better than I expected.  Bioshock was fairly smooth at maximum quality even at 1920x1200.  Using FRAPS, I got an average of 42.7 FPS.   Counterstrike Source was flawless and Medal of honor: Airborne was very playable.  Enemy Territory: QuakeWars ran fine as well yet, I did have to turn down the AA from 4x to 2x MSAA for it to be playable.  All in all, not "too" bad.  Here's a screenshot from Bioshock in DX10 mode:

Click HERE for HD version - 1920x1200, Uncompressed PNG (2.1 MB)



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