If your not a hardcore gamer, clean, or security concerned,
If you're security concerned (or paranoid), download the right protection tools or learn how to counter-act it instead of blabbering away about how MS is a load of [insert word here].
I never said MS is a load of ... stop reading my mind! lol and yes I do counter-act and have protection tools in place.
I benched my computers before and after doing any tweaks.
Any results? I'm genuinely interested to see the difference as I never actually did this.
What bench marks are you after?
I'm sure I'll get bit for sharing my personal report (but I've never cared what the sharkies think).
I've done a collection of them over WinXP Pro 32bit, Win Vista Premium 64bit, and Win7 Ulimate 64bit mostly. All on the same machine, same hardware.
The overall results actually ended up with WinXP Pro winning gaming performance wise and it was the most tweakable too increasing performance 35% over the original install. Of course you can't really compare 32bit to a 64bit OS though so I got a 64bit version too (I had access to all as my dad won a year MSDN subscription). WinXP Pro 32bit SP3 is still my favourite for a gaming machine.
WinXP won by an average of 10-12fps. WinXP also won the least memory used.
Win7 Ulimate is my favourite graphic wise and for applications. Slower than the WinXP tweaked, it's not as customisable, but still 12% increase from original install.
Win Vista was the worst performer out of the three in my review. But also not tweaked as much as either of the other two.
Crysis (1680x1050, AAx4, High, DirectX10, modded)...
WinXP: Gives max 128.96fps, avg 109.06fps, min 44.84fps
Crysis running on WinXP DirectX10 (faked, DirectX9 pipe though) at max resolution is much faster on Very High (with mods) but on other settings, similar than the other OS or 10-12fps increase.
WinVista: Gives max 120.07fps, avg 92fps, min 45.02fps
DX10 is not what drops frame rate, but yet Vista doesn't play Crysis as well and is the most RAM hog.
Win7: Gives max 126.12fps, avg 99.25fps, min 46.84fps.
Note that Vista and Win7 min is a bit higher which is good.
World In Conflict (Maxed @ 1680x1050)
WinXP (64bit): max 143fps, avg 65fps, min 34fps
WinVista (64bit): max 82fps, avg 41fps, min 13fps
X3 Terran Conflict (Maxed Resolution)
XP64: Min FPS - 12, Max FPS - 197, Avg FPS - 65.4
VS64: Min FPS - 16, Max FPS - 196, Avg FPS - 77.030
In OpenGL and CPU Intensive testing Windows XP handles them much better than the other two operating systems.
Crystalmark (higher score is better)
XP: 197395 / Tweaked: 198154
Vista: 185769 / Tweaked: 185772
Win7: 181032 / Tweaked: 181091
Super Pi (lower score of time is better)
XP: 18.01 / Tweaked: 16.92
Vista: 18.04 / Tweaked: 17.09
Win7: 17.43 / Tweaked: 17.10
Video Conversion (lower time is better)
XP: 11.1 / Tweaked: 9.7
Vista: 11.31 / Tweaked: 10.21
Win7: 11.16 / Tweaked: 10.13
3D Mark (higher score is better)
XP: 16313 / Tweaked: 16601
Vista: 15171 / Tweaked: 15342
Win7: 15381 / Tweaked: 15428
Cinebench (higher score is better)
XP: 3304 / 4790 / 11723
Vista: 3272 / 3767 / 11281
Win7: 3312 / 4071 / 11729
Cache and Memory (lower the better)
XP: 32.6 / 152.6
Vista 31.7 / 161.2
Win7: 33 / 156.7
CPU Arithmetic (higher the better)
XP: 44.12 / 47.68 / 51.24
Vista: 39 / 47 / 55
Win7: 39.79 / 47.47 / 55.15
Multi-Core Processing (higher the better)
XP: 16.14 / 44
Vista: 15.14 / 38
Win7: 16.48 / 44