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Windows 7 Graphics PC: Benchmarks Versus Windows XP

The following posting is taken from our thePhotoFinishes.com blog verbatim. The performance results for Windows 7 versus Windows XP are of interest.


Well we spent most of the weekend trying to figure out our benchmarks results – would Windows 7 be able to beat Windows XP in raw speed and performance? Here is that tale of the table:

Speed Comparison: Windows 7 versus Windows XP
Test Windows 7 Windows XP
Copy 800MB file from USB 29sec 27sec
Copy 800MB file to USB 59sec 52sec
Copy 800MB file to file 25sec 28sec
Copy 430MB directory USB to drive 31sec 68sec
Create 120,000 line .sql file using PHP 6sec 12 sec
Insert 120,000 records into MySQL Table SQL 46 min 05sec 140sec
Select 120,000 records with filterand group by <1 sec < 1 sec
Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table 24min 11sec 68sec
Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table SQL 275sec 16sec
Insert 60,000 records into MySQL Supplier Table PHP 291sec 18sec
Left Join between Product and Supplier Tables <1 sec <1 sec
Premiere Elements Boot up 29 sec 25sec
Premiere Elements Analyze Scene 200 sec 190sec
Premiere Elements write FLV 10min clip 640 x 480 630sec 428sec
Photoshop CS3 First Boot up 14sec 12sec
Photoshop CS3-Smart Blur 14MPixel image 16sec 12sec
Photoshop CS3-Finishing Impressionist 14MPixel image 9sec 6sec
Photoshop CS3-Finishing Filter Gallery 14MPixel image 15sec 9sec
Photoshop CS3-Finishing \impressionist 24MPixel image 31sec 25sec
Photoshop CS3-Crop, Resize, Shape, Color Correct <1 sec <1 sec
Photoshop CS3-Brighteness, Exposure, Sharpen <1 sec <1 sec
Photoshop CS3-Topaz Smart Sharpen 26MPixel image 20sec 18sec
Photoshop CS3-Reshape 26MPixel image 160sec 154sec
Photoshop CS3-Texture Finishing 26MPixel image 44sec 36sec

Green shows the faster performer and red marks where the speed of a system is 2 or more times slower than the other. Two things are obvious from these benchmarks. Windows XP on a 2.26GHz Dual Core PC with 3GB of RAM plus a 250GB hard drive consistently outperforms Windows 7 on 2.10GHz Dual Core PC with 4GB of RAM plus a 500GB SATA hard drive.

Well of course Windows XP does, it has a faster CPU. Well, not exactly.

I looked up the Passmark ratings of the two CPUs and the Windows XP Dual Core is rated at 1046 while the Windows 7 is rated at 1251. So theoretically, such a slight performance advantages of Windows XP remains an anomaly. But what is of real concern is the very poor performance of Windows 7 doing Web development tasks. PHP and MySQL ran significantly slower in Windows 7 using an XAMP . So I had to drag out PHPed and Xdebug to profile and debug the problems. To date I do not have any solutions or insights.

I was going to do some AutoCAD, Corel Draw, Java, JavaScript, Oracle and PostgreSQL benchmarking but the the Windows 7 problems with PHP and MySQL forced a delay in game penalty. If any readers have insights into the Windows 7 problems with PHP and/or MySQL please post a comment.

Summary of Benchmarks

On one hand Windows 7 on a Gateway with a 17.3 inch screen at $650 Canadian [before taxes] is a pleasure to work with. Users will have plenty of room to work in. And the new Windows 7 taskbar makes moving among apps a lot easier. The system had close to XP-like Boot up, Shutdown and Start-up or Hibernate restore times. And copy operations [ notably faster than XP] and open file popups are not painfully slow like in Vista. Also I have yet to run into the annoying Vista roller-coaster performance lags [bright and peppy for 20 minutes then slow as molasses in January for the next 25, then back to …..]. But I have to admit, it is galling to have to endure a 5-20% performance hit in photo and video editing when the new Windows 7 machine should be delivering the very opposite in performance.

4 thoughts on “Windows 7 Graphics PC: Benchmarks Versus Windows XP”

  1. Had a problem with my wamp setup on Bista and win 7 running very slow, but found that the default hosts file is setup incorrectly for localhosts

    YOURWINDOWSINSTALL\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

    editing this file, put this at the end of the host file:
    127.0.0.1 localhost
    # ::1 localhost
    127.0.0.1 YOUR-COMPUTER-NAME-HERE

    You’ll need to save the file on your desktop on somewhere else as you can’t write directly to the folder on win 7 (or vista). Then copy (drag) the file (with no extension) back to the original location. With administrator priviledges.

    You may need to restart your web services and maybe the pc to pick up the changes, but worked a treat for me, now it’s back to normal speed

  2. I am using both Wamp and Xampp for my Windows based LAMP-Linux Apache MySQL PHP local server setups. At first I was concerned that there would be a difference between Wamp and Xampp. But my testing found no such difference [admittedly I only ran about 10-12 tests] on either Vista or Windows XP. I promise to return to this anomaly and try out your suggestions – but currently the water of work is still incoming and its over my head …..

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