Windows 8 Consumer Preview vs. Windows 7: Benchmarked

[tezza]

Can Microsoft’s upcoming operating system keep up with — or even beat — Windows 7, or does Microsoft still have work to do?

The results

Here are the results from each of the benchmark tests. Each test was run three times, and the average taken from all three runs.

No significant variance was seen between the three runs in any of the tests, a consistency that gives me confidence in the results.

Boot time

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview manages to shave a few seconds off the boot time and the time it takes to get to a usable desktop.

Audio transcode time

Audio transcoding using iTunes is slightly faster on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The difference is more noticeable when large files are being transcoded.

Video transcode time

Windows 8 Consumer Preview is comfortably faster at transcoding video using Handbrake. Again, this becomes more noticeable when transcoding larger files.

PCMark 7

Once again, the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is faster than Windows 7, but this time the difference is staggering. The difference was primarily made up by an increase in the “creativity” score, which measures multimedia and DirectX performance.

3DMark 11

There appears to be no significant difference between the two operating systems.

The conclusions

We can draw some interesting conclusions from these benchmark results. The first and most obvious is that boot times have been cut quite nicely. Microsoft promised us this, and it seems that the promise has been delivered. We don’t reboot out PCs anywhere near as often as we once did, but a fast boot up time is still appreciated.

Next there’s the fact that, as far as the synthetic and gaming benchmarks go, the differences between Windows 7 and the Windows 8 Consumer Preview are negligible. This is quite interesting, because at this stage for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, we were seeing poorer results for anything that relied heavily on the graphics system. It usually takes AMD and NVIDIA some time to optimize and perfect their drivers for a new operating system, with drivers having to mature for several months before we see similar performance between the new operating system and the old one.

With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview we seem to be getting very good results from the current crop of drivers, which is good news for gamers who are planning to make a swift switch to Windows 8 when it is released.

We’re also seeing quite an improvement when it comes to audio and video transcoding. This is something I’ve come to expect from betas of Windows operating systems. It’s an area that Microsoft seems to put effort into improving, and that trend continues with Windows 8.

The higher than expected PCMark 7 score for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is interesting. Normally, I would be suspicious of such a difference between the two operating systems, and would be tempted to put it down to a bug with the benchmark tool. However, given that the bulk of the improvement was made up by an increase in the “creativity” score, and the fact we’ve seen an overall improvement in multimedia handling in other tests, I’m tempted to believe that this improvement is genuine.

The only result I am concerned about comes from the Heaven 3.0 test. The minimum FPS scores in this test seems to suggest that when the frame rate drops in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, it drops further than it does for Windows 7. If this translates into real world gaming, it would mean a poorer visual experience under Windows 8.

However, it’s quite likely that this is a driver issue, and something that will most likely be fixed when Windows 8 specific drivers come out.

All in all, I’ve very pleased with how Windows 8 is coming along. It is shaping up to be quite a capable operating system as far as performance is concerned.

Bonus: Overclocking with Windows 8

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a number of emails, mostly from gamers, asking me what Windows 8 is like when you overclock the hardware. There seems to be some concern that the operating system might make it harder to push your hardware to beyond what it was intended to do.

Given that I had a test-bed set up, I decided to see what I could do.

I was able to push the Core i7-2600K CPU up from the stock speed of 3.4GHz all the way to 4.7GHz without any problem at all. After some tinkering with multipliers and voltages, I managed to reach 4.9GHz with no stability issues and without the operating system throwing the towel in. At this point I decided to call it a day since I didn’t want to put a smoking crater into the motherboard.

Next I turned my attention to the GeForce GTX 560. Using AfterBurner I managed to raise the core clock from the stock 810MHz to 975MHz, the shader clock from 1,620MHz to 1,954MHz, and the memory clock from 4,008MHz to 5,126MHz by raising the GPU voltage. Again, the Windows 8 Consumer Preview didn’t complain.

These sorts of overclocks are what I’d expect to be able to achieve on Windows 7, so I would say that Windows 8 won’t make overclocking any harder. In fact, the faster boot times makes it a lot easier, because if there’s one thing you do a lot when overclocking, it’s rebooting.

Full tests at

http://www.zdnet.com...rked/19927?pg=3

[jasonliul]

More like ad for win8.

:smoke:

[tangkungan]

longer is better? :lol: :lol: :lol:

i believe higher is the more appropriate word..

[psyko666]

Longer is always better tangkungan.. ask my girlfriend.. :P

[Tweety.Abd]

Longer is always better tangkungan.. ask my girlfriend.. :P

LMAO! I'd love to interview your girlfriend :P jk

[LiLmEgZ]

Ill probably deploy the Release Preview on my tower when it becomes available. Since I am in computer tech support/repair area of expertise, I will have to learn Windows 8 so I can support it of course.