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Benchmarks
and Comparisons Continued |
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Business Winstone 2002 |
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Business Winstone 2002:
Business Winstone 2002 is the
latest edition of the popular application benchmarking
program. Its focus is to benchmark a PC's overall performance when running
applications that are commonly found an everyday
workstation environment. Some of the programs it runs
to determine a Business WInstone 2002 rating are:
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Lotus Notes® R5
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Microsoft® FrontPage® 2002 SP-1
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Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2002 SP-1
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Microsoft® Excel 2002 SP-1
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Microsoft® Access 2002 SP-1
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Microsoft® Word 2002 SP-1
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Microsoft® Project 2000
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WinZip® 8.0
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Norton AntiVirusTM from Symantec
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Netscape® 6.2.1
Some of you may be looking at
these scores and think that they are pretty low.
Actually, they are not, this is the first time that we've
tested with the newly release Business Winstone 2002 and the
scoring is much lower than the previous version. As with virtually all of the
tests, the MSI system maintained an edge over the comparison
system. This time around the MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR held a firm
lead over the KX7-333R by over a point at 333MHz. Once
we bumped the memory speed up to 400MHz. we saw an nice
increase of 8.2 points. This increase equates to over
30%, Clearly Business Winstone was the only application that
took advantage of the increase in bus speed, taking
advantage of all the KT400 had to offer.
As we bring this review to a
close, we are left with mixed feelings about
the KT400 chipset. While the advancements in the KT400
Vs the KT333 are insignifigant, the difference in performance
between the two are still very minor. In all fairness
to VIA, we did not have a AGP 8X video card to test with so
we can't totally knock the KT400's performance because that
is one area of the chipset that we could not test at this
time. Nonetheless, as the rest of the review showed,
there is little performance to be gained with the KT400.
This doesn't mean it's a poor product, but if you are
running a KT266A or KT333 motherboard and USB 2.0 isn't
important to you, then there is no real reason to upgrade.
But this is only half of the story.
As far as KT400 based
motherboards go, the MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR is an excellent product.
With so many new features incorporated into one system, this
motherboard is as complete as motherboards get. With
Serial ATA RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, Bluetooth, and
6.1 channel audio all integrated into a single product,
the KT4 Ultra is arguably one of the more potent Athlon
motherboards available. We were a little disappointed
by the features of the Promise RAID controller in regard to
its dual support for Serial ATA and IDE, as well as the
placement of the DIMM slots, but the rest of the
system truly impressed us..
When we went looking for prices
of the KT4 Ultra, we really began to see the value of the
KT4 Ultra. We stopped by
www.pricewatch.com,
and found the KT4 Ultra selling for $160. When you
consider that there is no need to purchase a separate sound
card or NIC, as well as factoring in the sum of all its
other features, the KT4 Ultra is a solid value at that
price. If a new Athlon based system is in your future,
choosing the MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR would be a very wise decision.
In the end, we give theMSI KT4
Ultra-FISR a HotHardware Heat Meter Rating of a 9...
HotHardware's PC Hardware Forum is all the rage! Are
you in?
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