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Benchmarks
and Comparisons Continued |
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Content Creation 2002 &
Business Winstone 2001 |
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Content
Creation Winstone 2002: Content
Creation Winstone 2002 is a benchmarking program that
measures a PC's overall performance when running multimedia
intensive programs. Some of the applications it uses
to determine a Content Creation 2002 rating are:
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Adobe
Photoshop 6.0.1
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Adobe
Premiere 6.0
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Macromedia
Director 8.5
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Macromedia
Dreamweaver UltraDev 4
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Microsoft
Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055
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Netscape
Navigator 6/6.01
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Sonic
Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)
Once again we
ran the scores with the original release BIOS and the
updated Release Candidate.
When we originally ran Content
Creation Winstone, the Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra was able to
top the KX7-333R ever so slightly. However, like we saw in
the other tests, the Dragon really took off with the updated
BIOS. Now we'll take a look and
see if this trend continues with Business Winstone 2001...
Business Winstone 2001:
Business Winstone is a benchmark that
measures a PC's overall performance when running
applications that are commonly found in the everyday
workstation environment. Some of the programs it runs
to determine a Business WInstone 2001 rating are:
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Five Microsoft
Office 2000 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage,
PowerPoint, and Word)
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Microsoft
Project 98
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Lotus Notes R5
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NicoMak WinZip
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Norton
Antivirus
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Netscape
Communicator
Here the Dragon board once again started out
lagging the Abit system, although the score increased nicely the second time around.
Overall, it was a tight race between the two systems, both
proving to be quite capable systems.
Now that we're bringing this
review to a close, let's recap some of the things we loved
and loathed, and issue the infamous "Rating." From a features perspective, the Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra has
it all. From USB 2.0, to the latest High-Point RAID
controller to the external USB Sigma box, Soyo has all the
bases covered. Although the performance was a little
low with the current release BIOS in comparison to the
reference system, Soyo has already begun to address
this and the results are shaping up nicely. The improved
performance gains achieved with the new Release Candidate
BIOS helped to make this board one of the best performing KT333
boards we've reviewed to date. Throw in excellent overclocking features and the Dragon Ultra really shines. Unfortunately, there were a few things
that did tarnish the Dragon Ultra's image. Like we
noted earlier, the lack of any retention device on the AGP
slot, some capacitors crowding the CPU socket, and the
omission of any type of thermal layer between the active
cooling on the Northbridge all detract from a
beautiful product. Some of you may be more forgiving
than others when it comes to the weight these negatives
carry in the big picture. With this reviewer, however, these
are significant enough to take away from an otherwise
stellar rating.
In closing, aside from a few
negatives, we were thoroughly impressed with the Soyo KT333
Dragon Ultra and give it a HotHardware Heat Meter Rating of
an 8.5!
HotHardware's PC Hardware Forum is all the rage! Are
you in?
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