These tests were completed using the following hardware: Core 2 Duo E6850, Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5 motherboard, ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB, 2x 1GB OCZ DDR2-800 at 5-5-5-15-2T, Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB HDD.

Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit Boot Time

For this test we installed SP1 and SP2 on identical hard drives before recording the time taken to boot from the initial BIOS logo screen to a working Vista desktop, using the Windows Vista welcome centre as the chequered flag.

Other than the Vista welcome centre, all other start-up processes were disabled prior to the imaging process. The boot time was recorded using a standard hand held stopwatch, with the test repeated five times and an average taken from the middle three results to produce the figures below.


Small file performance on the previous page showed that read times were slightly down and that appears to have directly impacted Windows Vista SP2 beta's boot time - it's around two seconds or three percent slower than our SP1 installation.

Crysis Level Load Time

For this test we used our Crysis benchmarking tool to queue up a number of Crysis benchmark runs and again used the hand held stopwatch to record the time the test system took to load our time demo. We used multiple runs to collect five results for each drive, with the the lowest and highest load times discarded and the average taken from the remaining three results.


Interestingly, our Crysis level load time was also impacted by this as well - and to a much greater extent - with our test taking on average almost five percent longer.