Is it worth it to upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista with new hardware?

[rasmasyean]

Hi,

I bought these:



ASUS P8P67 mobo

Newegg.com - ASUS P8P67 (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS



Intel Core i7-2600 3.4GHz

Newegg.com - Intel Core i7-2600 Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80623I72600



8GB of DDR3 1600 RAM

Newegg.com - G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL



500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive



nVidia GTX 460 SE 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Video Card

Newegg.com - EVGA 01G-P3-1366-TR GeForce GTX 460 SE (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card



The mobo manual "recommends" that you should use the latest supported OS to "maximize" your features. So this made me wonder a bit because my Vista "Windows Experience Index" is 5.9, which I don't think it was too much lower before with 3.5 year old hardware. Does Vista bottleneck performance with new hardware? Should I upgrade to Windows 7 or else I would suffer some sort of performance hit? I'm not using any SDD's or multitouch screens or anything like that.

 

[cwl7454]

At this point in time why not wait for Windows 8. You buy Win 7 & install it and within the year Win 8 has been released and tested.
Personally I skip an OS instead of shelling out the money and taking the time to do a clean install. 1 computer went from xp Pro, skipping vista, to Win 7, my computer still on Vista Ultimate 64 bit waiting for Win 8, skipping Win 7. The laptop still on XP Media Center which was recently sent to be repaired and came back with 2002 OEM version instead of the 2005 retail version that was on it.

Best bet tho is which ever one you install, go 64 bit.

 

[rasmasyean]

Yeah, well I installed Vista Ultimate 64-bit and what surprised me is that the "Windows Experience Index" was only 5.9 across the board. I found the WEI thread and apparently this is the "max" in Vista. Now is that a bug in the program, or is it that Vista bottlenecks out performance in some way and doesn't take advantage of new hardware? Or is it just some Microsoft ploy to get ppl to upgrade to Win7 just to see the number greater?

 

[cwl7454]

I too have Vista Ultimate 64; have 16GB Ram installed, like you, all is 5.9 except for the Ram which is 5.5; go figure. But like I said I am not going to buy a new OS every 3 years, I'm playing leap frog.

 

[rasmasyean]

Personally, I don't like the picture based taskbar. I rather have the words there to tell me what window it is.

But if Windows Vista does limit the performance because of old OS on new hardware, then I might consider upgrading because it would be a waste of money to not use the hardware fully too.

 

[rasmasyean]

I found this article that does some benchmarks.

It looks like they are pretty much the same but with Vista perfroming at the CPU minisculely better, and the Win7 performing at the VGA minisculely better.



It doesn't look like there's a reason for the 5.9 vs 7.9 difference. I did some research and those are the upper limits of the Windows Experience Index rating. It's prolly just some Microsoft marketing thing where they add in 2 points or whatever for "subjective user experience" with the new product. I bet Windows 8 cap will be like 9.9 or something...then 11.9...or they will come out with a completely difference useless rating.



http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/2886/windows_7_vs_vista_cpu_memory_performance_comparison/index.html