nForce 4 SLI Motherboard Round-Up

PC World Magazine's WorldBench 5.0 is a new breed of Business and Professional application benchmark, that we're looking to with promise here on HotHardware.  WorldBench 5.0 consists of a number of performance modules that each utilize one, or a group, of popular applications to gauge performance.  Below we have the results from WB 5's Photoshop 7 and Office XP modules, recorded in seconds.  Lower times indicate better performance.

PC World's World Bench 5.0: Photoshop 7 & Office XP Modules More Real-World Application Performance

The DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR continued its winning ways in both of the WorldBench 5 performance modules we ran.  In the Photoshop 7 test the LANParty NF4 SLI-DR was 2 seconds faster than the Gigabyte board and 5 seconds faster than the MSI board.  The Office XP graphs looks very much the same, with the DFI board finishing the test 3 seconds faster than the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI and a full 10 seconds faster then the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI.

Content Creation Winstone 2004 Real-World Application Performance

For this next batch of results, we used Veritest's demanding Content Creation Winstone 2004 suite.  Before running this test, we patched the program to its latest version, shut-down any unnecessary background processes, and defragged the hard drive.  The Veritest Content Creation Winstone 2004 test utilizes the following applications in its benchmark, for more information see this page:

• 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 contrast to the WorldBench 5.0 results, the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI surged slightly ahead here, and outpaced both the DFI and Gigabyte boards in the Content Creation 2004 benchmark.  With it's score of 37.4, however, the MSI board was still less than 1% faster than either of the other NF4 powered boards in this test.