Starting off with the application testing, Adrian uses PassMark PerformanceTest 6.1 and discovers that SP3 does produce a better result than SP2. Coming out on top is Vista 64-bit RTM which is slightly faster than SP1. You can get a closer look at those results over here.
![](https://www.tweaktown.com/images/imagebank/news_zdnetxpvistasp3-01a_full.jpg)
And moving onto the gaming side, the results are all up in the air. It's about an even split between XP SP2 and SP3 but Vista SP1 manages to win just about every game test over the shipping RTM version. You can see those results over here.