 We are moved into the new office and with it came... New Windows. Ahh... 🎵 Yeah, shiny new office but still the same old terrible jokes. But you know what's not a joke? Today's video topic, performance under Windows 10. Does it hold up to Windows 8.1? What about Windows 7 users out there? Do they need to upgrade? Drop a like on this video if you're glad that our upload schedule is such a mess right now that I can't even tease a future video and ask you to like this video if you're amped to see it. 🎵 Intel's bringing DDR4 to the mainstream with their all new Core i7 6700K and Core i5 6600K processors. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. Now to start with, the differences between different Windowses are obviously more than just performance in CPU intensive tasks. I mean, Windows 8 and the free upgrade to Windows 8.1 brought SMB 3.0 which in theory allows aggregated speeds during network transfers although I've never gotten it to work. Windows 10 has Cortana, the new Edge browser. Actually, there's one. Let us know if you'd like to see us use our sexy new 200 up 200 down fiber connection to determine which browser is indeed the fastest by mashing that like button. Ah, I knew I could come up with something. Sorry, where was I? Alright, Windows 10 features. It's got DirectX 12 although that won't make much of a difference until some games for it come out. And of course, it's got some UI improvements. Now, that last part probably wasn't getting you too excited about Windows 8 unless you were one of the tiny minority who actually bought a touchscreen laptop. And even though I have one, the lack of a traditional start menu has really put an acorn in my tailpipe over the last couple of years and breathed new life into third party start menu add-on companies. But with Windows 10, that might be a little different. The UI improvements are many. Some are pretty small, things like automatically prompting me for a second window when I arrow snap, tiling all my open applications when I alt tab, a huge improvement over that rubbish Rolodex thing that was introduced with Windows Vista. Oh, look, we have a 3D accelerated desktop experience. But some of them are huge. Virtual desktops, which are accessed with Windows and tab, are finally a Windows feature by default. This has been available for years on Linux OS X and even Windows with third party tools. And the new start menu, which I actually really, really like. It was as simple as giving me an all apps list and not taking up my whole f***ing screen with the start menu. Good on you, Microsoft. There are still a few things that are broken as all get out, like search. I mean, seriously, if I type uninstall, how is uninstall a program not the first search result? And there are still a few things I just need to learn, like I haven't figured out how to lock notification tray icons. So I can always see certain things like safe remove hardware and networking. So, yeah, so far I really like Windows 10. I did an in-place upgrade on my daily driver laptop and a fresh install on my desktop and haven't thought for a moment about reverting to Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 respectively. But what about that performance? Well, I had John, our new benchmarker and writer, put together a small suite of tests and run them for you folks on an identical hardware configuration across Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. All of them freshly installed and with the latest drivers and updates. He used a test bench that consists of an Intel Core i7-5930K, an Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard, 16 gigs of DDR4 GTX 980 Ti, and a Data SP900 SSD, and I guess that's pretty much the relevant components. And the results may shock you. On our test bench, and please note that with Quick Boot enabled and fewer devices in the boot menu and whatnot, these times could be much faster, but the importance here is the relative performance, not the absolute performance. Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 both left Windows 7 in the dust for cold boot times and go to sleep times, but all performed very similarly when it came to wake time. So there you go. In PCMark 8, I don't really know what to make of that Windows 7 number. There's no way on this blue orb we're standing on that that represents real world performance, but on Windows 8.1 and 10, it basically tells us that they're within spitting distance of each other. Then finally, we arrive at gaming performance, where across a test suite that includes basically a couple of modern games that tax both the CPU and GPU, we ended up with, well, no difference whatsoever. A testament to the repeatability of our gaming tests, if nothing else. But maybe there's more to this than meets the eye. Right now, for legitimate owners of Windows 7 and 8, Windows 10 is a free upgrade. So while in the past, upgrading for, ooh, new DirectX support that my graphics card might not even handle, even if games that utilize it come out before the next Windows upgrade cycle, was a bit of a tough sell. This time around, there's that. I mean, DirectX 12 looks ballin' AF, and you can learn more about it in this tech quickie video here, but there's also just no downside. So Windows 10 gets a big recommendation from us, from a performance point of view. Nothing to lose with our config, although please note, we only tested a limited cross-section of games and only one graphics card, so I still think it would be prudent to see if others with similar configs to your own are having any issues, but, uh, yeah, it's lookin' pretty good so far. Thanks for watching, guys! 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