Ubuntu 7.10 & Fedora 8 Performance Compared

Back in March we had compared the performance of Ubuntu and Fedora as we tested Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora 6 along with development versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7. During those benchmarks, Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 5 had a slight lead over Fedora but the race was extremely close. In August we compared Ubuntu and Fedora again along with Xubuntu, Mandriva, and SimplyMEPIS, but using older PC hardware. In these benchmarks, the results were also close but Mandriva was the leader. Now with the release of Fedora 8 last week, we have run a new set of benchmarks comparing it to the month-old Ubuntu 7.10.

The hardware we had used for these Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 8 benchmarks consisted of an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2GB of A-DATA DDR2-800 memory, Abit NF-M2 nView motherboard, Seagate Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive, and an ASUS GeForce 8600GT 256MB graphics card. For this testing, we had used the 32-bit versions of Fedora and Ubuntu with their stock package set. For the most part, the package versions are similar, but Ubuntu 7.10 ships with the Linux 2.6.22 kernel while Fedora 8 does ship with the newer Linux 2.6.23 kernel. With the GeForce 8600GT we had used the NVIDIA 100.14.23 driver.

Benchmarks for this article had consisted of Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, LAME encoding, Ogg encoding, timed disk reads, and RAMspeed. All of these benchmarks are very common to Phoronix articles, but if you have any questions about our testing procedures or other specifics, feel free to ask in the Phoronix Forums.