PC-BSD 7.1 vs. Kubuntu 9.04 Benchmarks

Earlier this month PC-BSD 7.1 was released, which is based upon the FreeBSD 7.1 stable release, but of course with the extra packages and changes that make PC-BSD an easier to use BSD-based desktop operating system. PC-BSD 7.1 ships with X.Org 7.4 and KDE 4.2.2 installed along with many other packages when using the x86 or x64 DVD installations. Though with the Phoronix Test Suite now having enhanced support for PC-BSD, we decided to see how well PC-BSD 7.1 performs against Kubuntu 9.04.

The hardware we used for this testing included an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor clocked at 4.00GHz, ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory, a 160GB Western Digital WD1600JS-00M hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card. With PC-BSD 7.1 we were using the x64 DVD with KDE 4.2.2, the FreeBSD 7.1 amd64 kernel, X Server 1.5.3, and GCC 4.2.1. With Kubuntu 9.04 we were using the x86_64 2009-04-10 daily spin with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, KDE 4.2.2, X Server 1.6.0, and GCC 4.3.3. As we are not focusing on graphics tests in this performance comparison, both operating systems were left using the VESA driver. Both operating systems were left with their stock installation options and all other options being left at their defaults.

With the Phoronix Test Suite we ran timed ImageMagick compilation, LAME MP3 encoding, 7-Zip compression, Gzip compression, LZMA compression, GnuPG, POV-Ray, C-Ray, GraphicsMagick, BYTE Unix Benchmark, and Fhourstones.