Is there any real difference in the PPD for XP Home, XP Pro,Vista Basic, Vista Premium and Win7 Premium? The machine would be an old 939socket Athlon x2 with 2x8800GT. I have mainly used XP when using Windows clients and anything else goes onto Linux (Ubuntu,Mint, Fedora). Just let me know. Trying to squeeze as many points from it as possible
Stick with XP mate, cant see a lot of PPD difference in the OS's myself but Vista/Win 7 deffo produces a bit less, could be due to them nicking more of the available ram etc, plus theres the whole dummy plug thing with Vista/7 which im not sure was sorted by the 190.xx drivers... Ive had rigs crash randomly and blue screen on Vista x64 but the I've changed nothing besides putting XP on and the rigs have been reliable since XP it and dont look back lol Oh and Prifinity only works properly on XP which is a must for multi SMP & GPU rigs!
You know.. using Windows 98 allows more free resources to be used, and will increase your PPD score from XP. You know, if you are scrapping every little bit of points... sure, why not. You have to choose. If anything newer than XP is worth it for your usage or not. If it's ONLY for PPD.. then lower your OS to an older one or stay with what you have. Here is my experience & Opinion By going to Vista 64-bit from XP 32-bit, I saw a HUGE performance increase from my day to day applications and system usage, and this include responsiveness of the system. From Vista 64-bit to Windows 7 64-bit it was improved even more, despite not having my motherboard chipset drivers for Win7 (Using Windows Update drivers.. which I think are the ones from Vista 64-bit). Mainly, this is due in having everything stay in the RAM rather than on your HDD, and that the UI is rendered (thanks to Aero (not Aero Basic)) by the GPU instead of the CPU. But, you will lose about ~5fps in most games (which I gain back from Windows 7). As for Folding... I have no idea, I don't do it... but assuming you do, lets say a more then a few points (worse case scenario)... you have to choose.. some silly score or system usability.
Plus dedicated folding rigs arn't used for everyday tasks as they are 'dedicated' so dont need anything fancy, just an OS, a free antivirus product if you want a little piece of mind, the folding clients and some monitoring/remote software which is why I believe XP is the most logical OS to use for dedicated rigs. My main i7/GTX295 gaming machine is Win 7 which is where I want the system usability and features etc (and some bigadv's when I know im not going to be gaming for a few days) lol We folding types will try and get everything we can from our rigs without killing reliability which is why a good 24hrs of stress testing should be done really on CPU's & GPU's...
