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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 |
| Desktop Application Performance |
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The Business Winstone tests include: -
Five Microsoft Office 2000 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word) -
Microsoft Project 98 -
Lotus Notes R5 -
NicoMak WinZip -
Norton Antivirus -
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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