In a brief search I didn't see a thread that discussed the following...

On a system with an E6850, 8800GTX, and 8GB of RAM is there any benefit to turning OFF Aero? Will disabling Aero make any meaningful performance difference in Vista 32/64 on said system? While I appreciate the contemporary Aero look I can sacrifice it if it makes a truly notable difference.

I choose to leave Aero on most of the time, but you can get a performance boost by turning off selected features of Aero. You can disable visual effects and gain performance in XP too. So, sure you can gain performance by adjusting the amount of visual resources are being used by the OS, especially when gaming.

I'm sure you know this, but yeah sure adjust the operating system's visual performance to gain an edge if you gaming for example. To put it simply, the less things the OS is doing in the background, the better the performance will be.

Right click on My Computer
Click on Properties
Click on Advanced System Settings
Click Advanced tab
Under Perfromance click 'settngs'

What i do with a lot of my XP machines is to click on "Custom" and uncheck all the boxes except 'Smooth edges of screen fonts' and the bottom 2 features. Works in VISTA too.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/ [...] tions.html

Thx for the reply. Yeah, I guess what I am really wanting to know is on my particular type of rig whether it would make a difference. Or, in other words how much of a machine is needed for it not to matter whether Aero is on or not. ...or will disabling Aero always make a machine noticably faster? ...even a 2010 high-end box? Will there be a time when the hardware is strong enough that Aero won't slow a box down?

So how come my P4 3Ghz actually slows down when Aero is disabled...? Especially all types of video has playback problems with Aero turned off... driver issue perhaps?(ATI Radeon X1600 Pro)

Hmmmm...don't know.

Beleive me with your specs there is no need to worry about disabling aero not when the min specs are:

1ghz cpu
1gb RAM
20gb free space on 40gb hdd
128mb graphics (32bits per pixel, pixel shader 2.0 support, WDDM driver)

Think you beat that somehow mate

I'd leave Aero on with that machine... you have plenty of horsepower.

Unless you're running games in Windowed mode instead of full screen, Aero should automatically "unload" when you launch a game, so it shouldn't harm game performance at all.

Aero switches the display production to your video card's ram and gpu so it can actually speed up your system, or so it is said. I've never noticed any trace of a slowdown with it turned on. I suppose if you have shared video/system ram then maybe it could be a problem And yes it turns off automatically when you start up a 3d game.

Yes and even if you play in windows mode, if you right click on the game exe and go to compatibility you can have it shut of aero whenever you launch the game even in windowed mode so you can still leave aero on.

I'd leave aero on, it really doesn't harm performance at all. It can "seem" slower just because animations take time, but you can turn all the animations off and still have aero on and enjoy having no window tearing like you would have when aero is off. Aero actually lowers my cpu usage a bit when moving a lot of windows around as opposed to having it on.