Testers over at Devil Mountain Software have analyzed the performance of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Release Candidate). They found that "testing with OfficeBench showed an ~10% performance boost vs. the same configuration running under Windows XP w/Service Pack 2."

Windows XP Service Pack 3 build 3244 is now twice as fast as Windows Vista in the OfficeBench benchmark program. They used a Dell XPS M1710 laptop with 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM and nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS video. The machine runs Microsoft Office 2007.

"Since SP3 was supposed to be mostly a bug-fix/patch consolidation release, the unexpected speed boost comes as a nice bonus," Craig Barth, Devil Mountain's chief technology officer, said on his blog. "In fact, XP SP3 is shaping up to be a 'must-have' update for the majority of users who are still running Redmond's not-so-latest and greatest desktop OS."

Windows XP SP3 Release Candidate has been issued to about 15,000 testers, Microsoft said. The new Service Pack 3 for Microsoft's previous operating system will feature more than 1,000 hot fixes and patches that have been issued in the past three years, as well as at least four new features, some of which will be ports of Vista tools.