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Easing our four board round-up
into gear, we've taken some numbers from a few runs of
Business and Content Creation Winstone tests, from ZD
eTesting Labs.
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ZD eTesting Labs
Business and Content Creation Winstones |
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Desktop Application
Performance |
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The Business
Winstone tests include:
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Five Microsoft
Office 2000 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage,
PowerPoint, and Word)
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Microsoft
Project 98
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Lotus Notes R5
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NicoMak WinZip
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Norton
Antivirus
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Netscape
Communicator
Talk about a
horse race! The i845PE and GE driven boards both
edged out the i850E/PC1066 setup, by negligible numbers well
within the margin of error for these tests. The SiS648
driven Asus P4S8X (review coming soon!) pulled ahead by a
more significant margin, due in part to it's high bandwidth
1GHz Southbridge interface, which bolsters disk performance.
Content
Creation Winstone 2002 tests include:
- Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1
- Adobe Premiere 6.0
- Macromedia Director 8.5
- Macromedia Dreamweaver
UltraDev 4
- Microsoft Windows Media
Encoder 7.01.00.3055
- Netscape Navigator 6/6.01
- Sonic Foundry Sound Forge
5.0c (build 184)
Here we see more
of the same, with perhaps a slight nod to the higher
bandwidth of the i850E/PC1066 system, versus the i845PE or
GE boards. The SiS648 again takes the lead with its
overall hard disk advantage (something we've knocked on SiS
chipsets in the past) but again, by a less than commanding
lead.
In the XMPEG
test, we took a MPEG2 video clip and converted it to DIVX
format with an installed DIVX 5.02b CODEC. This method
of conversion and compression is heavily CPU and overall system bandwidth dependant. What was surprising was
that the i845PE based Asus P4PE outpaced even the Iwill
i850E board with its PC1066 RDRAM. It seems as
though, with finer tuning of the i845 chipset, its new
333MHz characterized memory speeds and a little special
sauce from Asus, DDR RAM can compete with RDRAM and on
its own turf.
Quake
3, 3DMark 2001SE and Comanche 4
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