Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46GHz 1066MHz FSB

Our Business and Content Creation Winstone testing will showcase overall desktop performance using standard business, desktop publishing, multimedia creation and 3D rendering applications.

Business & Content Creation Winstones Real-World Application Performance

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

The Pentium 4s posted scores all within this test's margin of error versus each other.  However, the Athlon 64s averaged 13 – 16% lead in the Business Winstone test suite.

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

The Content Creation Winstone test shows a nearly identical performance spread with the Pentium 4s all bunched up at the 33-point mark and the Athlon 64s showing a 15 – 17% performance advantage.  Somewhat interesting to note is that the higher-bus bandwidth of the new 3.46GHz Pentium 4 EE allows it to keep pace with the 3.6GHz P4 Prescott core CPU, which has a full 200MHz clock speed advantage.  Regardless, the differential between those scores and the standard 3.4GHz P4 EE is negligible. This test also underscores what we've all known for quite some time now and what Intel has had to admit wholeheartedly over the past few years: Higher clock speeds do not always equate to higher performance.