Windows 7 versus Windows XP on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA Netbook

Sandra 2009, HD Tune and Geekbench

Sandra 2009 Memory Bandwidth

The Sisoft Sandra 2009 benchmark utility just came out recently and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. With Sandra 2009 you can now easily compare the performance of the tested device with its speed and its (published) power (TDP)! Sandra XII SP2 also has SSE4 (Intel) and SSE4A (AMD) benchmark code-paths, which is great for those of you testing next-generation AMD & Intel chips.

It seems we may have found a weakness in Windows 7 with this memory bandwidth test. We were surprised to see such a difference!

HDTune

HDTune is a free benchmark that measures the disk’s transfer rates, access time, burst rate, and CPU utilization when reading from the disk.

Windows XP

Windows 7

We were happy to see that Windows 7 did not have as much fluctuation in the transfer rate test in HDTune. The averages and access time were nearly identical between Windows XP and Windows 7, but Windows 7 seemed to fall behind on the burst rate and CPU usage during this hard drive test.

Geekbench

Windows 7 seems to redeem some of its memory bandwidth performance problem in Sandra by performing nearly identical in Geekbench’s memory score. The main difference in the scores above are in the floating point test, otherwise the performance was nearly identical in memory and integer scores.