Well, it’s been a couple of days since I installed Server 2008 and set it up as a workstation, so I wanted to follow up since I’ve had a couple of days (and a few dedicated hours this evening) to live with it.
I did find some showstoppers for me. Although the OS seems faster than Vista (and nearly as fast as XP), and benchmarks quite well (with synthetic benchmarks), I did not find the WOW! factor that the posters I linked to in my original post found. Also, I found gaming support to be quite poor.
As for performance, it was one of those things I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Somehow the GUI seems much more responsive than on Vista, which to start off gives a feeling of “wow, this is faster than Vista”. However, I found application start times to lag behind Vista a bit. My machine is an AMD 64 x2 4600+ with 6GB of DDR2 800 RAM, and my main drive is a WD 3200AAKS 7200 RPM SATAII w/ 16MB Cache buffer (I have 2 older drives I use for Data storage only). Now, it’s not a full out killer top of the line system anymore, but it shouldn’t take it 15 seconds to start Firefox. I know 15 seconds sounds trivial, but it feels like forever when you are used to it opening instantly.
With gaming, I couldn’t get Battlefield2 to run for more than 5 minutes to save my life! Also, HL2 Lost Cost and CS:Source gave good overall FPS results in the “Stress Tests” (average FPS given at the end of the test), but the graphics looked “jumpy” on the screen – it wasn’t smooth at all and the FPS was constantly going up and down during the test – something I hadn’t experienced before.
I hear you now, “It’s a server OS, it’s not meant for gaming!”, and that is true, but that is a must if I was going to run it as my desktop OS. My main reason for wanting my desktop machine back on a Windows platform was so I could get online w/ my friends and play CS and BF2. I kinda miss it!
Now for a couple of pluses – the OS seems to handle cpu utilization/prioritization better than Vista – 3DMark gave a GREAT CPU score. Also, VMware Workstation was flat out flying even with (the hard to virtualize) Vista running as a guest.
All and all I could see this being a super option for someone needing a true “workstation” – not a home PC – someone who is coding or perhaps dealing w/ 3D modeling would I’m sure be quite happy.
I’ve spent the last couple of hours setting up my machine with Windows XP Pro x64 Edition (x64 is a must with 6GB of ram, and 6GB) and I plan to STAY HERE until I get a new machine (which will definately be after Windows 7 is out).
As a side note, for those who are interested, I’m working up a full review (from a musicians standpoint) on Ubuntu Studio, which is working beautifully on my laptop!
Filed under: Computing
