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Our first battery of real world benchmarks, comes from the
former ZD Labs offering, now known as eTesting Labs.
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Winstone
Benchmarks |
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Business Apps and a little
Content Creation |
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eTesting Labs
Winstone tests are a good indication of Desktop Business
Application performance. We'll start with the Business
Winstone tests. Here's what they're made of...
Application used
in the Business Winstone tests include:
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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
As you'll note
in the above graph, it looks as though the Athlon XP 2600+
has opened the proverbial
can of "whoop-ass" on the 2.8GHz Pentium
4. However, the tests utilized by eTesting Labs here,
are based on older Microsoft applications without specific
Pentium 4 optimizations. Here, with legacy code, the
Athlon posts strong scores.
Content Creation
Winstone 2002, on the other hand, utilizes significantly
more system bandwidth dependant tests with more current
applications such as:
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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)
The Pentium 4
2.8GHz pulls away from the Athlon 2600+ here. Even at
2.53GHz, with PC1066 RDRAM, the P4 takes the lead.
Notice also that the i845 DDR based P4 2.4GHz system, nearly
falls victim to the Athlon 2200+, lending credence to the
fact the P4 needs memory bandwidth, in order to perform to
its fullest potential.
Crunching MPEG
files and converting video to different formats, takes
plenty of CPU horsepower and system bandwidth. We'll
show you how the Pentium 4 2.8GHz Pentium 4 stacks up in
this department, next.
FlaskMPEG and XMPEG - Video Encode Performance |