Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows XP has been on the market now long enough for most people to decide whether or not they want to install and use it on their systems. It's easily the smoothest, prettiest and most stable OS yet from Microsoft. But is it fast? Everyone is saying it is....but we are going to show you a quick comparison today to let you know just how much faster, if any, than XP is over Windows 98 Second Edition, from a Gamer/Overclocker's perspective. Not a long article indeed, yet a view of several different benchmarking programs that will compare the two operating systems head to head.
Microsoft Windows 98SE vs WinXP
Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows XP has been on the market now long enough for most people to decide whether or not they want to install and use it on their systems. It's easily the smoothest, prettiest and most stable OS yet from Microsoft. But is it fast? Everyone is saying it is....but we are going to show you a quick comparison today to let you know just how much faster, if any, than XP is over Windows 98 Second Edition, from a Gamer/Overclocker's perspective. Not a long article indeed, yet a view of several different benchmarking programs that will compare the two operating systems head to head.
Test System:
Windows 98 SE and Windows XP Professional, running on the following system:
AMD 1.4GHz Tbird CPU @1500MHz
MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU Motherboard
256megs of Kingmax PC2400 DDR
Maxtor 40G 7200rpm HD
Visiontek GF3 Video Card
Both versions of Windows freshly installed on Identically matched hard drives. nVidia Detonator 21.83 Drivers used for both systems, with default settings (no tweaks). Via 4.35 4in1's used for both. Both 98SE and XP were fully updated using Microsoft's Windows Update function. 98SE was installed using FAT32 and XP was installed using naitive NTFS.
Benchmarks: Lets get right down to it and start of with some SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks. Theoretically, CPU, Multi-Media and Memory benchmarks should be the same. Lets take a look.
Just as we suspected. Each OS running @1500MHz is pretty much neck and neck. Neither score negligibly above the other in both marks. Lets see what Multi-Media scores show us.
Here we see Win98 winning in the raw Integer score, and XP wins Floating Point, which is to be expected as XP has more enhancements for newer chip technology such as MMX, 3DNow...etc. Memory scores below.
Windows XP is pulling slightly ahead in both FPU and INT MMX scores, but not by much. Certainly not enough to get excited about, and as we suspected before, Win98 and XP are competitive given identical hardware. One thing I would like to mention though is that XP appears to handle memory leaks MUCH better than Win98. Upon consecutive runs of the SiSoft Memory Test, Win98SE scores drop lower and lower and lower with each additional test. While XP scores stay relatively the same no matter how many times they are run. In interesting note to say the least.
Lets move on to 3DMark2000 and 2001 to see what type of differences we'll see with gaming and video benchmarks.
Here we are seeing Windows 98SE as the clear winner. Even though nVidia drivers have been optimized for XP, 98 takes the crown in this category for both iterations of 3DMark. Lets see some Quake3 action next.
Windows 98SE wins this competition as well. Showing more FPS in resolutions below 1600x1200. Our video card is the bottle neck at that resolution so CPU and/or OS will not affect that score, but again, Win98SE is more efficient in the 640x480 and 1024x768 resolutions.
The next benchmark we have is AMD's very own N-Bench. This is the first time we are using this benchmarking program at OCA and will most likely incorporate it into our future reviews for benchmarking purposes. Lets see how the numbers stack up.
Keeping with the trend, it looks as if Win98SE dominates slightly in N-Bench scores. Showing a higher total score as well as higher average frames per second. Ok, lets finish this off with Dronezmark.
Quite a different benchmark than most. DronezMark shows you the minimum, maximum, and average frames per second which is really quite informative, as opposed to a simple score. Dronez utilizes nVidia's nFiniteFX engine and is also highly tuned for Intel's P4 processor. With this, we see Windows XP's performance above that of 98SE in Maximum fps as well as average. 98 ends up higher in minimum fps.
Conclusion: It looks as if we'll have to give the SPeeD crown to Windows 98SE. While XP is Microsoft's greatest effort in the OS arena to date, 98 comes out on top for raw performance. XP will give you bells and whistles, a smooth interface, and stability, but if your looking for every bit of performance you can squeeze out of your system, chances are good you'll want to keep a separate partition on your hard drive with 98SE installed.
One thing we need to keep in mind as well. Neither operating systems were tweaked in this review. There are several XP tweaks out there that will surely boost performance and bring any of these individual benchmarks up quite a bit. So it all boils down to what is convenient for you, and does an extra 5 frames per second in your favorite game matter when it comes down to the wire. Be sure to checkout our review of Windows XP if you are thinking about upgrading and want a quick glance at what you can expect with XP.
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