By the time you read this review, there will be numerous 32-bit applications available for running under Windows 95. To gauge the advantages of 32-bit performance, we installed and tested Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel for Windows 95 on the IPC Austin PowerPlus 133. Using NSTL's application-based benchmarks, we compared the results to the 16-bit versions (
see the graph
).
We discovered that the advantages of switching from 16- to 32-bit applications are dependent on the application itself and the type of processing performed. For instance, file I/O performance improved by almost 60 percent in the Word benchmark running Word for Windows 95 in place of the 16-bit Word 6.0 for Windows. In the Excel file test, the system performed an average of about 5.5 more transacti
ons running the 32-bit version of the application.
The Word search test and Excel calculation benchmark stress processor and memory subsystems. In the search test, the 32-bit version of Word produces nearly 40 percent more transactions than the 16-bit version. And Excel for Windows 95 outperforms its 16-bit counterpart by nearly 50 percent in the calculation test. The PC's performance in the video-intensive Excel scrolling benchmark actually declines by about 13 percent. This may indicate that the default Windows 95 video drivers have not yet been optimized to achieve maximum performance.
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32-Bit Performance Advantages
