DFI 855GME-MGF and Pentium-M Dothan Desktop Performance
Business and Content Creation Winstone 2004 Tests
Our Business and Content Creation Winstone testing will showcase overall desktop performance using standard business, desktop publishing, multimedia creation and 3D rendering applications.
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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.
