With the increasing emphasis on environmental protection, renewable energy, especially wind power, accounts for an increasing proportion of power generation. For its higher reliability and efficiency, permanent magnet synchronous generator becomes a promising alternative. Control techniques play a very essential role in wind turbine systems. By now, many advanced control schemes have been discussed and employed to permanent magnet synchronous generator wind turbine systems. In this paper, four popular advanced control schemes, namely, field oriented control (FOC) and voltage oriented control (VOC), direct torque control (DTC) and direct power control (DPC), deadbeat control (DBC) and model predictive control (MPC), are presented. Their theories and performances are investigated and compared, which are confirmed with experimental data obtained at a lab constructed test bench.