So Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has come and gone with not much really said about it, sure there was plenty of talk before it came out but you don't hear much after the fact. Of course I installed it I was curious as to what if any differences there were between them, from what I can recall Microsoft said that the Service Pack didn't include any performance enhancements or anything like that to the core of the OS, and honestly if doesn't feel much different to me. It does actually 'feel' a bit slower though to do things, like load thumbnails for instances, I've got tons or pictures on my computer and they just seem to load much slower now, also I noticed when I click 'My Computer', click a drive to open it or pop in a USB drive it seems slower there as well to react, maybe it's me as I haven't really heard anyone else mention it.

So for my own purposes I decided to run a bunch of tests to see if there was any real differences, after all Benchmark and testing software is designed to pick up very small imperceptible differences in things that we normally wouldn't notice. We wouldn't notice a few nanoseconds or milliseconds most likely but the software will as that's what it's for, to measure things like that. So I ran SiSoft Sandra, Cinebench, 3dmark06, SuperPi Mod 1.5 and TmpgeNC before and after the upgrade to SP3, I decided instead of just keeping it all to myself, why not share the results, and well there is a difference between SP2 and SP3 and it's a mixed bag of results really, in some cases SP2 is better and in others SP3 is, but there is obviously something going on, something changed and I'm not sure if it was for the better...

So continue on to see the results...

XPSP2 vs XPSP3 Performance Comparison

Author: Kristofer Brozio

Testing and Comparison -Basic Tests:

My system consists of:

Intel C2Q6600 running at Stock 2.4Ghz

EVGA nForce 680i Motherboard (122-CK-NF63-TR)

OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 SLI-Ready Edition Dual Channel 2Gigs

(-EPP mode with 4-4-4-15 1T timings)

2x EVGA 8600GTS Video Cards

First test would be 3dMark06 , I don't think any introduction is needed, everyone knows what this program is and does, 3dMark06 was run both SLI Enabled and Not Enabled.

1 point difference, with SP2 coming out better.

The next test is video encoding or recoding as the case may be, using TMPGEnc to to see how long it takes to encode or re-encode a video file. The file is an AVI file that is being converted to MPG. It is 3 minutes and 48 seconds long, with 5720 frames and is 70.5 MB in size. Of course here again the lower the score the better.

No differences here at all.

SuperPi Mod 1.5, the time to calculate to 1 million

XPSP3 is slower to calculate Pi by a fraction of a second, but still slower...

Next up we have Cinebench 10, I ran separate tests with SLI Enabled and Not Enabled just cause I was curious as to the differences or effects it would have on the program.

How Does MAXON CINEBENCH Work?

The test procedure consists of two main components: The first test sequence is dedicated to the computer's main processor. A 3D scene file is used to render a photo-reaslistic image. The scene makes use of various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders. In the first run, the benchmark only uses one CPU (or CPU core), to ascertain a reference value. On computers that have multiple CPUs or CPU cores and on those who simulate multiple CPUs (via HyperThreading or similar technolgies), MAXON CINEBENCH will run a second test using all available CPU power.

The second test measures graphics card performance and is run inside the 3D editor window. The project file used can test all graphics cards that support the OpenGL standard. This scene places medium to low demands on graphics cards and tests the maximum speed with which the scene can be properly displayed.

-Results viewed as Higher is Better

We can see that Rendering with only one CPU causes SP3 to lag behind a bit, but when Rendering with all four CPUs SP3 is the better choice, and we have the same result with the OpenGL test, SP3 is the better choice.