Microsoft says Windows 11 is 2x faster, except they used ancient PCs to benchmark Windows 10

Facepalm: Microsoft is once again aggressively pushing users to move from Windows 10 to Windows 11. This time, the Redmond firm is boasting that the newer OS is up to 2.3x faster than its predecessor – but fails to mention its deeply flawed testing methodology.

Tech giants aren’t renowned for their honesty and openness. When it comes to making claims and pointing to benchmarks, it’s not just Nvidia that plays fast and loose with the truth.

With Windows 10’s October 14 end-of-life date approaching fast, Microsoft is publishing articles seemingly every other day to convince users to update to Windows 11. In the latest blog, Executive Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi writes that Windows 11 is 2.3x faster than Windows 10.

The figure comes from Geekbench 6 Multi-Core benchmark scores – Microsoft used just a single synthetic test for this claim – but this link (aka.ms/w11claims) buried in the footnotes contains an interesting section.

“Based on testing performed by Microsoft in December 2024 using Geekbench 6 Multi-core score comparing a selection of Windows 10 PCs with Intel Core 6th, 8th and 10th generation processors and Windows 11 PCs with Intel Core 12th and 13th generation processors.”

FYI: Over the years, TechSpot has benchmarked Windows 11 vs Windows 10 several times. The first time was in 2021, and then again with variations of gaming tests and CPUs here, and here, and last time was in 2024.

So, Microsoft decided the best way to show off how much faster Windows 11 is than 10 wasn’t to test both on the same systems. Instead, it ran Windows 11 on Intel machines from 2022 to 2024, and Windows 10 on Intel laptops between seven and nine years old.

For comparison, the weakest device Microsoft used in the Windows 10 test was an Intel Core i3-6100U CPU, a 2-core/4-thread chip built on the 14nm process. The closest 13th-gen equivalent, the Core i3-1315U, has six cores and eight threads, can turbo up to 4.5GHz, and is built on the Intel 7 (10nm) process. Its IPC performance is estimated to be up to three times better than the 6th-gen chip.

Microsoft does add the disclaimer that “performance will vary significantly by device and with settings, usage and other factors,” but most people aren’t going to see it, and the 2.3x faster claim in the main post is shockingly misleading.

The reality is that Geekbench 6 scores for both operating systems on the same machine would be almost identical, but a blog titled “much older hardware is slower than newer hardware!” is unlikely to send many Windows 10 holdouts running to Windows 11.

Microsoft offers some valid reasons why moving to Windows 11 could be a good thing, and many games often run faster on the latest OS, but misleading claims like this one aren’t doing its upgrade push any favors.