Quote from hcour:
Vista Ultimate.
It would still be interesting to see a comparison between the Basic and Ultimate. My bet is still on the simpler system....
Here is a comparison between XP and Ultimate. XP EASILY wins!
http://www.ozhardware.com.au/Hardwa...Vista-Performance-Comparison/Results-PCM.html
"We can see an overall performance decrease of about 15% in Vista compared to XP, and when looking through the results, the main culprits are the graphics memory tests, where XP was a massive 11 TIMES Better than Vista!!! XP was able to pass through 3600frames per second compared to Vistaâs lowly 312FPS. Again, hopefully future driver releases can help fix this issue, as thatâs just pathetic.
Video playback of a WMV file also suffered greatly under Vista, giving just 30.8FPS compared to 69.1FPS under XP. This means Vista would struggle to do anything else while a WMV video is playing, quite poor really considering the hardware weâre testing on.
HDD performance was generally better on XP, but only by a few % barely worth a mention really. The only areas Vista excelled in were rendering transparent windows (i.e. like the Aero theme) and audio decompression. For transparent windows, Vista beats XP almost 4-fold, with 2671windows/sec under Vista, to 713windows/sec under XP. Microsoft has obviously optimised this process quite well for Vista to make the Aero theme run smoothly. Audio decompression was twice as good under Vista, working at 2665KB/s compared to 1371KB/s under XP. Unfortunately audio compression is the same under both, so you wonât be able to rip your CDs to MP3âs any faster."
---------and another one-------------
"We installed the RTM (release to manufacturing) Vista Ultimate code on desktop and notebook systems of varying specs and ages, and then we ran a series of benchmarks to answer several key questions about Vista's impact on performance. Our main findings:
--Vista is generally slower than XP, but it's better at multitasking on dual-core PCs.
--Your PC should have 1GB of RAM at the bare minimum.
--Aero won't slow you down if you use a discrete graphics processor and enough memory.
--Apps run slower on the 64-bit version of Vista, but adding RAM closes the gap."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128305-page,1-c,vistalonghorn/article.html