Abit's Fatal1ty AA8XE

Synthetic benchmarks, rendering tests, and game benchmarks only tell part of the overall performance story, so we benchmarked our test systems in some simulated "real-world" scenarios as well.  For this next batch of results, we used Veritest's Business Winstone 2004 suite, followed by the more demanding Content Creation Winstone 2004 suite...

Business & Content Creation Winstones Real-World Application Performance

The Veritest Business Winstone 2004 test utilizes the following applications in its benchmark:

• Microsoft Access 2002
• Microsoft Excel 2002
• Microsoft FrontPage 2002
• Microsoft Outlook 2002
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
• Microsoft Project 2002
• Microsoft Word 2002
• Norton Antivirus Professional Edition 2003
• WinZip 8.1

The Veritest Content Creation Winstone 2004 test utilizes the following applications in its benchmark:

• Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
• Adobe Premiere 6.50
• Macromedia Director MX 9.0
• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1
• Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
• NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b
• Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f

Unlike the Kribibench results from the previous page, both of the Winstone benchmarks show the Athlon 64 4000+ as having a definitive performance advantage over the Intel based machines.  The Athlon was significantly faster than any of the Pentium 4 powered rigs in both of the Winstone tests.  Looking past the Athlon scores, we find that all of the i925XE motherboards performed within a fraction of a point of one another.  The Intel reference board took the top spot in the Business Winstone test, and the Asus board was the winner in the Content Creation test.  Abit's Fatal1ty AA8XE was right up there though, keeping pace with the other i925XEs the whole way...