Windows Vista SP1 Now Available ... Is It Worth It?

By Kevin O'Brien, NotebookReview Staff | | 19642 Reads

Today Microsoft released the long awaited Service Pack 1 update for Windows Vista. We have seen some positive performance gains with the prior release clients offered to the public, and wanted to test what changes, if any, the final release has. For this test we picked a review notebook that we have in the office right now (Averatec AV2500), and benchmarked it before and after the SP1 Standalone update.

Averatec AV2500 Specifications:

AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-64 2.2GHz Dual Core Processor
Windows Vista Home Premium
12.1" WXGA LCD
2GB DDR2 667MHz (2 x 1GB)
Hitachi 250GB 5400rpm Hard Drive

For each test, we ran each benchmark twice. Our benchmarks include 3DMark06, PCMark05, and wPrime 1.58.

Before SP1:

PCMark05	3,168 PCMarks
3DMark06	381 3DMarks
wPrime	36.019 seconds

After SP1:

PCMark05	3,037 PCMarks
3DMark06	377 3DMarks
wPrime	38.968 seconds

Results Summary:

PCMark05	4.1% drop in performance
3DMark06	1.0% drop in performance
wPrime	8.2% drop in performance

Every test across the board showed a drop in performance, which was very surprising as we had very favorable results with a prior release client of SP1 when we were testing the Dell M1530. The 3DMark06 score was very close before and after, but the other two benchmarks show a pretty clear drop in performance.

Since we know that many of you will be installing this thing probably as fast as we did, please post your results before and after to share what results you are finding after upgrading to Service Pack 1.