Socket 939 Motherboard Roundup: ABIT, MSI, Gigabyte
Synthetic benchmarks and games only tell part of the performance story, so we took all four of these Socket 939 boards 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.
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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
Unlike all of the other benchmarks we ran, Business Winstone 2004 indicates the nForce3-based motherboards are clearly faster than the K8T800 Pros. The Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939 and MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum finished within a fraction of a point of one another, followed by the K8T and ABIT AV8. In this test, the nForce3s were about 7.3% faster than K8T800 Pros.
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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 2004 tests also show the nForce3-powered motherboards having a clear performance lead over the K8T800 Pro-based boards. In this benchmark, the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum came out on top followed very closely by the Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939. Those two boards posted scores about 1.4 points higher than the K8T800 Pro-powered MSI K8T Neo2-FIR and ABIT AV8; about a 4.1% lead for the nForce3s.
