Shuttle's SB81P XPC

The Synthetic benchmarks and encoding test we've run this far only tell part of the overall performance story, so we took the Shuttle SB81P XPC to task in some "real world" scenarios as well.  For our first set of real world tests, we did some benchmarking with Ziff Davis' Business Winstone 2004 suite, followed by the more demanding Content Creation Winstone 2004 suite.

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 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 borrow a phrase from all of the Presidential race hoopla monopolizing the news reports as of late, the results in both the Business Winstone 2004 and Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmarks ended in a "virtual dead heat".  All three of the systems we tested scored within a fraction of a point of one another.  Yet again, the Abit AA8 held onto the top spot in both tests, followed by the SB81P in the Business Winstone 2004 benchmark, and the i875 / Prescott combo in the Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmark.