Q6600 on XP. Faster or Slower Than Vista?

[Pez D Spencer]

Here's the deal. I was running Vista Ultimate for about 6 months up until this weekend. Last week I bought a Q6600 to replace the P4 that I had been using in the PC shown in my sig. Overall I was pretty pleased with Vista and I planned to keep it.

I don't know exactly what happened, but after tearing down my PC and putting the quad core in, my X1950 video card no longer worked. I'm always careful about ESD but my only guess is that I zapped it. When I say no longer worked, I mean completely dead, I got no video at all even at POST.

I only had the X1950 for about 5 months so I RMA'd the card to Newegg. But the bummer was that I didn't have a backup card. I recently sold all of my old PC gear to build this new system. And the only place close to where I live that sells video cards is Wal-Mart so I was stuck having to buy one from there.

Wal-Mart carries 2 types of cards in my local store: an FX5500 PCI card and an X1300 PCI card. The FX5500 was about half the price of the X1300 so initally I went with that. However, I didn't bother to check the output of the card when I bought it and I realized when I got home that the FX5500 only had VGA output and no DVI. This was a problem because my monitor is only DVI and Wally World doesn't carry adapters.

Eventually I was forced to return the FX5500 in favor of the X1300 but before I returned the FX5500 I put it in my system and hooked it up to an old CRT just to see if I could figure out if I could get the X1950 going. After putting the FX5500 into my system the video worked fine, Vista installed some nVidia drivers and it was all good. However, using a 15" CRT for 2 weeks until my replacement X1950 gets here wasn't an option so I had to take the FX5500 back and get the X1300.

So I get home with the X1300 put it in the PC but Vista won't detect the card. I got a video signal but Vista would only use the VgaSave driver. I tried every version of the 7.x Catalyst drivers but kept getting a "no installable hardware detected" error message from the Catalyst installer. I won't go into everything I tried to get the X1300 to work in Vista but believe me I did EVERYTHING. After 3 days I finally gave up and installed XP SP2. In XP SP2 the X1300 was detected fine. The drivers work and there's no more VgaSave.

I'm still not sure if the X1950 was bad because both the FX5500 and this X1300 are PCI cards and not PCI-e like the X1950. I guess there's still the possibility that the PCI-e slots on the mobo are bad, but I won't be able to tell until I get another PCI-e card. Even though I got no video on the X1950 the fan was running on it and someone told me that if the slot on the mobo was bad then the fan wouldn't work which makes sense I guess.

So now I'm back to using XP. Before I tore my system down to install the quad core I imaged the partition where Vista was installed just for safety. I already did a full image backup two days prior to this but I had installed several new programs so I went ahead and did it again.

I used that image mulitple times to reinstall the OS when I was trying to get the X1300 to work under Vista and had no problems. (I also tried clean installs of Vista in an effort to get the card working but it didn't help). But apparently the image got corrupted somewhere along the way and I could no longer use it.

Like a dumbass, instead of making a separate image I overwrote the old one so I only had one disk image. That means when the image when down the crapper, the only way to get Vista back is to do a total clean reinstall which really blows.

Initially I had planned to just use XP with this crappy X1300 until my replacement X1950 gets here and then go back to Vista. But now, since I've got XP rebuilt with all my apps and whatnot, I'm considering keeping XP until I get a DX10 card which will probably be when the next gen nVidia cards come out. From what I understand this will be around March of 08. I figure since I only have DX9 card anyway, I might as well keep XP. Even though it might not look as good as Vista, XP does feel "lighter" and my aging X1950 might be able to squeeze a few more FPS out of Crysis when it's released.

And finally my question, will my Q6600 perform better under XP or Vista? I haven't had a chance to use the Q6600 on Vista (except in VgaSave mode) so I can't say. Let me know what you think.

Sorry for the long post for such a simple question, but I'm kinda jacked on coffee and couldn't stop typing.....

Thanks.

 

[jmmtn4aj]

XP certainly feels faster here, but then when I ran Vista I turned on all the effects so the fancy fade-in fade-out stuff probably made things seem slowly. In terms of memory management Vista is better, in-game performance.. both are almost the same with the right tweaks. I'm using XP Pro because x64 drivers are still a tad buggy, and I can BT properly because the TCP/IP autopatchers dont work.

 

[F1shF4t]

Vista seems to speed up a lot after about 1 week of use. Never ran XP on my quad but on the X2 i would say that it felt just as fast around the desktop. I have a WD Raptor so that probably helped it somewhat also. Downside is that it does use a lot of memory but with current setup and 4 gig who cares.

Now on the laptop thats a different story XP is faster than Vista.

 

[nyker96]

I would imaging xp is still bit faster since it's lighter on resource than vista, in most games you probably get better frame rates in dx9 xp than dx10 vista right now. But can't deny the beauty of the nice aero interface though and vista seems to load some program faster. I use xp on my rig but played witha friend's vista machine quite a bit. I like both actually, xp is simple and direct, vista looks better and more modern. But since I only run dx9 card, no point for vista yet until I buy a dx10 card which I'm waiting for a second gen dx10 card, current stuff isn't too impressive yet.

 

[mjavid]

There is a free download which I am currently running, that provides Windows XP with Vista skins and interfaces: Vista Transformation Pack 7

MJ

 

[omeganot]

I'm currently running Vista x64 and must say I'm enjoying it. In all honesty for core intensive processes, I think Vista x64 outperforms XP x64. Mainly, I believe this is due to better core management in Vista over XP. In XP an application that was not designed for multi-core (aka, more than 2) almost always ended up running on cores 0 and 1. This left the latter two cores basically unused. However, Vista seems to assign cores almost at random. Even if your app can only use 2 cores, it might be cores 1 and 2, or 1 and 3. Who knows!

I got to test this in a very interesting way recently. Our company makes a software product for producing static code metrics for a supplied code base. It's very disk intensive (during the parse), RAM intensive (to store the millions and millions of data points) and CPU intensive (to do all the floating point calculations). Now, we didn't code it up with 4 cores in mind (though we're drastically trying to change that) so it only uses 2, basically at full load during a parse. On my first run Vista assigned cores 1 and 2 to the application. Now, after that was done I ran another project, still keeping the application open. This time while parsing it used cores 1 and 3. I'm not sure why it decided to make the switch, but it did. Regardless, the other two cores handled Firefox, GIMP, and any other app I wanted to throw at it with ease. Loading and closing said apps multiple times while running this parse only varied the parse time by 23 seconds (in 27 minutes).

I'd say if you have 4GB of RAM to handle the massive footprint of Aero, go with Vista. It definitely knows how to handle those 4 cores better.

 

[graysky]

Vista and it's clunky interface is known to be slower. Have a look at the "general trends" data in my x264 benchmark results. The vista systems are measurably slower, but that by *that* much when it comes to x264.exe anyway.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Vista has better core/power management. However, WXP is generally faster under normal use. I have a clean installed image of Vista and XP for quick restoration. My vote is for XP.

 

[Saiyukimot]

the vista transformation pack is bad for XP. It messes around with core system files, and can cause problems that only formatting will fix. It messed up with my network lol.

Want your pc to look like Vista? Get Vista

 

[paulmichaelkemp]

i have BricoPack Vista Inspirat Ultimate 2 installed on XP, is that the same as vista transformation pack? mines been fine running this.