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Now for the benchmark
that has been run numerous times by so many reviewers
across the world, I think we all may have some sort of
"repetitive stress" disorder in a few years, Quake 3
Arena.
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Some OpenGL Performance |
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This is the
Benchmark that never ends! |
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QUAKE 3 ARENA:
To "isolate"
CPU performance when running a timedemo in Quake 3, we set
the resolution to 640x480, the color depth to 16-Bit and
lowered the geometry and texture detail. As you can
see, both boards performed within 1% of each other.
While physically the ECS P4IBAD and the Transcend TS-ABR4
don't have much in common, as far as performance is
concerned to this point, they're almost identical.
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More Performance |
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More of the Good
Stuff! |
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Next we
ran ZD Labs' Business Winstone 2001 benchmark on both
the P4IBAS and TS-ABR4. For an explanation of
what this test entails, we'll quote ZD's eTestingLabs
website:
"Business Winstone is a system-level,
application-based benchmark that measures a PC's
overall performance when running today's top-selling
Windows-based 32-bit applications on Windows 98 SE,
Windows NT 4.0 (SP6 or later), Windows 2000, Windows
Me, or Windows XP. Business Winstone doesn't mimic
what these packages do; it runs real applications
through a series of scripted activities and uses the
time a PC takes to complete those activities to
produce its performance scores."
The
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
BUSINESS WINSTONE:
In the
Business Winstone tests, the ECS P4IBAD holds only a
slight performance lead over the Transcend TS-ABR4.
However, the "office type" applications used in this
test no longer stress the CPU and other subsystems
enough to show huge differences from one similarly
equipped system to the next, when a high-end processor
is used. On the other hand, Content Creation
2002 is intense. What do you say we run that one
next?
CONTENT
CREATION WINSTONE 2002:
Content
Creation Winstone 2002 runs a series of scripted
activities as well, but consists of more "bandwidth
hungry" applications like:
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Adobe
Photoshop 6.0.1
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Adobe
Premiere 6.0
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Macromedia Director 8.5
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Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4
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Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055
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Netscape
Navigator 6/6.01
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Sonic
Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)
Here the
tables are turned and the Transcend TS-ABR4 bests the
ECS P4IBAD by a bit. The performance difference
is miniscule though and would be imperceptible to the
end-user.
CONCLUSION:
We were
pleasantly surprised by the performance and stability
of both the ECS P4IBAD and Transcend TS-ABR4.
While both of these boards may not have been packed to
the gills with features, they did what they were
designed to do and did it well. The performance
levels of both boards was on-par with other products
in their class and throughout our testing neither
board exhibited any instability whatsoever. We
wouldn't recommend either of these boards to our
hardcore readers but users looking to build an
inexpensive Pentium 4 system for "everyday" use, will
be pleased with either product. As of the time
of this writing, both the ECS P4IBAD and Transcend
TS-ABR4 can be found for less that $100 US.
Because of their similarities in features and
performance, we won't be rating these boards
individually. Based on their good stability,
performance and rock bottom prices we'll give both the
ECS P4IBAD and Transcend TS-ABR4 Hot Hardware Heat
Meter Ratings of...
Discuss this or any
other Hot Hardware Review in the PC Hardware Forums!
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