Windows 7 Benchmark Results ‘Very Promising’

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet tested pre-beta Windows 7 release 6956 against Vista RTM and Vista SP1. Win 7’s snappy boot time and dominance in other tests suggest that a good OS is on the way.

Early on, we showed you completely non-scientific evidence of Win 7’s pleasingly fast boot time. (Shutting down is another matter—my build (6801) sometimes takes forever.) I was glad that Kingsley-Hughes—using a Phenom 9700 quad-core system with ATI Radeon 3850, 2GB of Corsair Dominator RAM and WD’s 10K RPM Raptor as primary drive—managed to demonstrate that the fast boot isn’t a fluke. By the way, Vista SP1 had the slowest boot.

In two other tests, PassMark Performance and PCMark Vantage, Win 7 pre-beta beat the Vista builds, though it failed to trounce them in the CineBench R10 test.

Remember, this is a pre-beta, so nothing is guaranteed, but what makes this newsworthy is that Kingsley-Hughes—who incidentally is in no way a Bond villain—ran similar tests with Vista a few years back, and early Win 7 makes a mockery of that noise. Check the ZDNet article for the full system specs and benchmark scores—I’m sure at least some of you will want the nitty gritty. [ZDnet via Lifehacker]