Asus P5AD2-E i925XE Motherboard

For this next batch of results, we used PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004 suite, followed by the more demanding Content Creation Winstone 2004 suite.  These tests are comprised of some fairly standard issue, every-day applications, that most end users work with at some point or another.

Business & Content Creation Winstones Real-World Application Performance

The PC Magazine 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 PC Magazine 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

The Athlon 64 has always has an edge in the Winstone tests but frankly this test suite is getting a bit long in the tooth and outdated.  We'll be phasing the Winstones out of our test suite offering here in the not so distant future, in favor of newer business and professional application benchmarks.  For now however, for these types of application, we're most comfortable with the consistent repeatable results generated by the Winstone suite.  In short, for this series of tests, our P4 systems and the Asus P5AD2-E post up respectable scores but since this test doesn't really provide much analysis for multitasking performance nor are the applications heavily SSE optimized, the Athlon 64's shorter pipeline offers better performance clock for clock.