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CNET Labs tests Windows XP
Application performance
CNET Labs tested XP's application performance using BAPCo's SysMark 2001 benchmark. SysMark 2001 consists of two applications, Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity, and it runs actual workload scenarios at realistic execution speeds. (For a complete overview of SysMark test procedures, click here. SysMark 2001 assigns a performance rating for each scenario (Office Productivity and Internet Content Creation) and calculates the geometric mean of those scores to come up with an overall rating. To test XP on a variety of configurations, we ran the benchmark on these systems: Pentium 4-1.5, Athlon 1.4, Athlon 1.0, Duron 850, and Pentium III-667.
Gaming performance
To test gaming performance, CNET Labs ran Quake III Arena's (version 1.11) TimeDemo Demo001. This is a canned demo of the actual Quake III gameplay engine. We ran the test with V-Sync disabled and with every graphical setting at its highest, except for the resolution, which we set to 1024x768.
Different hard drive configurations
To determine the effects of different-sized hard drives on Windows XP's performance, CNET Labs ran SysMark 2001 on our Athlon 1.4 system. The hard drive sizes we tested were 10GB, 20GB, 46.1GB, and 100GB.
Different RAM configurations
We also tested Windows XP's performance with varying amounts of system memory (RAM). CNET Labs ran SysMark 2001 on our Pentium III-667 system. The RAM configurations we used were 96MB (SysMark 2001 minimum), 128MB, and 256MB. Note: XP requires a minimum of 64MB of RAM, and Microsoft recommends at least 128MB.
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