The most important thing to remember is that their benchmark is not an average, and will depend heavily on both graphics and memory performance.  However, I will show you in a bit how overclocking your CPU and memory does not help one bit in terms of achieving an overall high score. 

Before I do though, I would like to focus on graphics for a bit, as it is one of the key components in overall performance.  Regardless of what articles you may have read that state otherwise, you must have a decent video card in order to take advantage of Vista's most impressive features. 

I addition to having a minimum of 1GB of RAM to enable Aero, you must have a GPU capable of supporting this feature as well.  Let me give you some detailed info on what is really recommended...

The graphics card you use must support the following features...

• Direct-X 9 GPU that supports pixel shader 2.0 in the hardware

• Configured for 32-bits per pixel

• 128MB of memory onboard

If you're card does not support all these features, you will not only be unable to take advantage of Aero, but your overall WinSAT score will be affected.  How much so?  Well, even if you overclock both your CPU & Memory, if you don't have a mid to high end video card, you're overall score will be quite low.  As an example, let's take a look at the WinSAT scores on the test bed before and after overclocking.

Before we look at both of the results, let's first take a look at the test system's specs...

Seems like a decent system doesn't it?  Not really.  On top of the issues focused in this article, the system also had difficulty with other components as well.  After testing the RC2 release for two weeks now, I was plagued by the following dialog on occasion...

**click to enlarge**

Superfetch, for those who do not know yet, is a new performance feature in Windows Vista.  This new technology allows applications to load much faster than their previous operating systems.  In short, Superfetch in a way "learns" which applications are frequently accessed and pre-loads them into memory.  This feature, however, failed to work on occasion, loading the dialog above from time to time.   Based on all I know on this feature, I thought it was the memory that was to blame, but just couldn't believe that considering these sticks are some of the very best I've used.  After additional testing, it was interesting to find that the hard drive itself was the culprit.  After I removed this high performance SCSI drive and loaded a WD SATA Raptor, this issue practically was non-existent.  Another thing to note when choosing your components.

**click to enlarge**

Looking at the results when running at stock speed, we see that all components other than the video card were able to achieve a high score.  However, due to the lower end GPU, it affected the score significantly, resulting in an overall score of only 3.5.

But what about overclocking both the CPU and memory significantly?  Did it make any difference?  Let's have a look at the results...

**click to enlarge**

We can see that the benchmark did not change one bit in terms of the scores achieved from both the CPU and memory.  The only difference was a .1 increase on the graphics performance, which does question its reliability.  CPU was taken from 2.8GHZ up to 3.4GHZ, also pushing the DDR400 memory to 500MHz.  This did not seem to help one bit. 

But what about overclocking the video card, the culprit of the low score?  Well, unfortunately, none of the overclocking utilities did work on this version of VISTA.  The only tool that loaded and was able to function was ATITool, but it failed to retain the new Core and Memory speeds.  Other popular utilities either failed to load or resulted in a number of errors when attempting to work with the software.

Conclusions

The bottom line here is that WinSAT is not to be used as a means of measuring the performance of your hardware, but one that should be used to determine whether or not your hardware is capable of taking advantage of all Vista has to offer.  That's important because many do think otherwise and are quite confused over the results.  This is not a benchmarking tool like those you are accustomed to using and it should be perceived that way.  In fact, its primary function is to determine whether or not your system is capable of handling Aero.  As I showed you here, Vista relies heavily on both memory and graphics performance, both key factors in determining what features to enable automatically.  Overclockers out there will be disappointed.  Overclocking your CPU and memory does not help, considering it is primarily designed to flag the weak components in your system, giving you the opportunity to upgrade any that may be a factor in overall performance. 

The purpose of this short article was not only to provide you all with valuable information on what you'll be facing when the time comes to upgrade, but also provide you with a glimpse of what Microsoft's next operating system will require in order for you to run it at its full potential.

Questions?  Comments?  Discuss them here...