Does $1000 Windows Perform Better??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,375 words · ~6 min read
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a decade ago you could buy a copy of Windows for a normal price or you could
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buy a copy of Windows for like twice as much that had extra features like the
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ability to join a domain uh support for more RAM or even the ability to set a
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video as your desktop background oo but
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did you get any additional performance for your money fair question and one
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that was asked many times only to find
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out that no No in fact you did not but what about Windows Server operating
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systems surely a
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$1,000 version of Windows would have
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some kind of under the hood performance tweaks right in today's video we're
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going to find
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out we now have awesome posters
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available for lonus Tech tips Techquickie and Channel Super Fun check them
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out at the link in the video description okay so if we're measuring
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the performance of two different pieces of software the last thing we want is
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some kind of a hardware bottleneck so we're using a balls to thewall
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configuration we've got a 5960x 8 core
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processor from Intel we've got an x99 Deluxe 2 motherboard from ASUS
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128 gigs of quad Channel ddr4 memory
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from gskill a GTX Titan XP from NVIDIA
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an X540 10 GB Nick from Intel and
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finally for our boot drive we are using Corsair's latest mp500 NVMe PCI Express
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SSD then I set up like a little dock so
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that with two separate installs on two separate drives of Windows 10 and
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Windows Server 2016 I could go through exactly
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asterisk the same setup procedure down
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to the order of reboots and the Order of application and Driver installs to
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create the same basic state for both of
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these operating systems then anytime I'm
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measuring performance of something like rebooting for example or a game if I
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have to screen capture I'm using the HDMI pass through of this BenQ monitor
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going to an Avio epan capture card over to a separate computer so nothing that
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I'm doing affects the performance of the system whatsoever no xsplit no nothing
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like that so at this point I've actually finished running all of the Windows 10
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numbers and you guys are joining me for the exciting part where we compare
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Windows Server 2016 and find out if it can blow Windows
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10 out of the water or not so we got our
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screen cap going we got our first Benchmark walk ah here it goes the Ida
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cash and memory Benchmark wow some of
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these are like down to the point decimal
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place of a Gigabyte per second
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identical so our first result is in and
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it looks like pretty much within margin of error uh the performance is the
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same let's keep going time for everybody
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body's favorite Benchmark sitting a
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bench 1371 okay pass Mark CPU
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Mark W that was exciting we are a little
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lower on the server operating system let's go ahead and log
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that and move on to dis
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Mark wow okay so uh dis Mark results are in
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and things are getting pretty boring we
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come in a little bit lower on the server 2016 machine but not really in like a
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big way or anything like that
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okay sorry oh so that's uh that's the
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addo results
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wow pretty similar maybe gaming will be
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a performance
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Revelation okay first game Benchmark ashes of a singularity 4K High direct
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X12 here we go show me the big
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difference in 3 minutes and 15
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seconds so curiously ashes of the
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singularity did have a significant performance
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difference but server 2016 was much
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worse than Windows 10 see how rise of the Tomb Raider does
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okay last Benchmark Doom at 4K
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Ultra so far gaming is not looking good
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for Server 2016 okay then so outside of games where
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we saw a server take a bit of a beating actually they perform pretty much the
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same within margin of error but this shouldn't be much of a surprise to
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anyone who's familiar with the term konel so the kernel is the very core of
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the operating system that's responsible for memory management and for allowing
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the hardware itself to interact with other pieces of software and drivers and
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vice versa so Microsoft actually reuses
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fundamentally the same kernel between their server operating systems and their
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consumer operating systems and this has been the case ever since Windows XP
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where an MS DOS based kernel got replaced by the Windows NT kernel and
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the advantages of doing this were several so it streamlined development
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while dramatically improving the stability of the consumer product I mean
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what was the point when you really get down to it of spending extra to maintain
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two parallel kernels so that one of them could be good and one of them could be
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like kind of unstable it also dramatically improved
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interoperability have you ever noticed that uh driver or a software application
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that runs on Windows Vista generally ran
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on Windows 7 without too many hiccups that's because they're based on a very
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similar version of the Windows kernel so
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what are the differences some can be easily reversed like control alt delete
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to sign into a server operating system or pretty animations on your you know
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Windows when you drag them around on the consumer ones some of them are
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artificially imposed like RAM limitations no remote desktop connection
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no domain connectivity for home editions
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and some of them actually come from third-party developers who might lock
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down their software from running on non-server versions so our data
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replication software as an example of this or even from Hardware companies who
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don't want their Hardware running on nonv validated versions of Windows so
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the onboard Wi-Fi on this board for example even with a cheat through device
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manager manually pointing it at the driver file simply refused to work but
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the biggest difference comes down to the massive amount of code that goes into
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adding features that would have little to no value to the average home consumer
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so things like uh Enterprise networking functionality or the ability to Nest
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virtualized operating systems within other virtualized operating systems
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virtualization setion so the bad news
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here then is if you spend $11,000 on your operating system uh you won't get
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any performance benefit the good news
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though is that for $100 or even less if you're the Linux type you are already
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getting the most out of your Hardware so
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