Windows Vista Boot & Crysis Load Times

For this test we used disk imaging software to create an exact copy of the same Windows Vista Home Premium install on every hard disk drive before recording the time taken to boot from the BIOS logo screen and a working Vista desktop, using the Windows Vista Welcome Centre as the chequered flag.

Other than the Vista Welcome Centre, all other start-up processes were disabled prior to the imaging process. The boot time was recorded using a standard handheld stopwatch, with the test repeated five times and an average taken from the middle three results to produce the figures below.


Away from Iometer's synthetic tests and back firmly in the real world, the OCZ Vertex is just as fast, booting Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit in just 32 seconds, a results that's equal to any other SSD we've tested, including the SLC based Intel X25-E.

Crysis Boot Time

For this test we used our Crysis benchmarking tool to queue up a number of Crysis benchmark runs and again used the hand held stopwatch to record the time the test system took to load our time demo. We used multiple runs to collect five results for each drive, with the the lowest and highest load times discarded and the average taken from the remaining three results.


The Vertex's speed advantage when booting Windows Vista sadly didn't translate so well into Crysis level load times, with a time of thirty seconds a similar result to every other MLC based SSD we've tested. However, this isn't too much of a disappointment, and still represents a 4.6 second advantage over the fastest mechanical hard disk drive.