DFI 855GME-MGF and Pentium-M Dothan Desktop Performance

Our Business and Content Creation Winstone testing will showcase overall desktop performance using standard business, desktop publishing, multimedia creation and 3D rendering applications.

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

When running standard "office productivity" applications, like Word, Outlook and Frontpage, a 2GHz Pentium M on the DFI 855GME-MGF is as fast as the fastest Pentium 4 or Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors, even with their 1.5+GHz speed advantages.  Also of note is that a 2.5GHz overclocked Pentium M on a 533MHz FSB actually begins to challenge an Athlon 64 in this benchmark and is significantly faster than even the fastest P4.  Keep in mind however, that the Pentium M doesn't have a Hyperthreading engine on board, so as a result heavily multi-tasked usage models will suffer a bit of a performance penalty when compared to a Pentium 4.

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

Content Creation Winstone, with its memory intensive applications like NewTek Lightwave, Adobe Premiere, and Windows Media Encoder, shows a bit of a different picture.  The DFI 855GME-MGF and a stock Pentium M on a 400MHz FSB and 333MHz DDR single channel memory bus, is starving a bit for system memory bandwidth.  As we see here, the 2GHz Pentium M brings up the rear by a significant margin.  However, turn up that Front Side Bus and memory speed to 533MHz and 440MHz DDR and our 2.4GHz (18X multiplier) and 2.5GHz (19X multiplier) Pentium M scores best both top end Pentium 4 scores by a hair.  The Athlon 64 with its low latency on chip memory controller still holds a solid lead however, over the fastest Intel based systems.