The best performance increase was in our //Crysis benchmark with a pair of Radeon HD 4870 1GB cards running in CrossFire - Microsoft did promise some graphics performance improvements, but they weren't as unanimous as we were expecting them to be. This was really the only
scenario out of the six that were tested where we saw any kind of performance increase.

Despite mentioning the GIMP image editing test as the application that suffered the most from the new Service Pack beta, it was the OS boot time and //Crysis level load times that concerned us the most. We would have hoped the new Service Pack would improve boot times further and not increase them by between three and five percent.

The promise of increased power efficiency by up to 10 percent is one that will certainly pique the interests of notebook users for sure, while support for Windows Search 4.0 and Bluetooth 2.1 will be beneficial as well. However, these things aren't enough for us to recommend upgrading to the Service Pack 2 beta today on any systems that are mission critical - Microsoft is keen to point out that the Service Pack 2 beta is very much for evaluation purposes only.

With that in mind, a lot of what we've looked at here could change drastically between now and when Windows Vista Service Pack 2 is final and, like Microsoft, we recommend sticking with a fully patched Windows Vista Service Pack 1 installation for the time being. So, unless you are planning to test out some of Vista Service Pack 2's new features, continue on with your SP1 install at least until SP2 reaches Release Candidate or RTM status.