|
By,
Dave Altavilla
March 22, 2004
In terms of
general desktop business application performance, we're of
the opinion around here, that
Veritest's Winstone benchmarks are fairly good
indicators of performance associated within the types of
applications the average professional, corporate or home
user may work with, in every day scenarios.
 |
|
Business and Content Creation Winstone 2004 |
|
Desktop Publishing, Spreadsheet Analysis,
Multimedia Content Creation and Audio/Video
Editing |
|
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
Here the 3.4GHz
Prescott CPU and its 1MB of L2 cache, keeps pace and
actually sneaks by the 3.4GHz Northwood P4 by just a hair.
However, as is evident in the 3.2GHz Prescott and Northwood
numbers, it's really a virtual dead heat for the two
mainstream CPU cores. The extra 2MB of L3 cache on the
P4EE give it about a 4% lead but not enough to catch the
Athlon 64 FXs. Lastly, the Athlon 64 3400+ brings up
the rear.
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
In the Content
Creation Winstone 2004 run, we saw much the same spread of
performance in the field, as we did in the Business Winstone
test. Prescott is neck and neck with its Northwood
counterpart and the P4EE is the strongest of all P4 scores.
However, clearly the Athlon 64s have the upper hand across
the board in this test.
|
|
|
XMPEG
5.03 |
|
Digital Video Encoding |
|
Encoding and
converting digital video files historically has been the
Pentium 4's strong suit. We ran an updated version of
our standard XMPEG test with version 5.03 of the software
and version 5.1.1 of the DivX CODEC. This test takes
an MPEG2 test file and converts it to AVI.
One thing is for
sure, the Athlon 64 family has been making strides with the
DivX CODEC and this utility. Both the 3.2GHz and
3.4GHz Prescott P4s show excellent performance here as well,
with the 3.4GHz flavor coming in with a dead heat against
the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 EE. Unfortunately, none of the
high end P4 CPUs could quite catch the Athlon FX chips but
they had a fairly easy time with the 3400+.
Windows Media Encoder, Cinebench and SPECViewperf
| 
