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 | | ZDBench Winstones | | Playing with the stones | | Content Creation Winstone 2002: When it comes to multimedia application benchmarking, we think Content Creation Winstone 2002 is well suited for the job. This program uses a series of popular multimedia based applications to assess a system's abilities and issues a final "score". Below is a list of applications that Content Creation Winstone 2002 uses to come up with its rating. -
Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1 -
Adobe Premiere 6.0 -
Macromedia Director 8.5 -
Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4 -
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055 -
Netscape Navigator 6/6.01 -
Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184) | The Abit and MSI board were dead on, both scoring 39.1 Winstones in Content Creation 2002. The Gigabyte board moved on past these two, producing the top score of 39.7, a difference of just over one percent. As a group, they all performed well, and overclocking the Abit board gave us a gain of 7.6 Winstones, an increase of almost 20%.
Business Winstone 2002: 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 2002 rating are: -
Lotus Notes® R5 -
Microsoft® FrontPage® 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® Excel 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® Access 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® Word 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® Project 2000 -
WinZip® 8.0 -
Norton Antivirus from Symantec -
Netscape® 6.2.1 | With Business Winstone 2002, the Gigabyte 8PE667 was the top performer again, with the Abit BG7E following closely behind, followed by the MSI 845PE Max2. The scores were all within a 0.5 range from top to bottom. Increasing the bus speeds, we got up to 34.3 Winstones with the BG7E, an increase in performance of only 12% this time around.
After putting the Abit BG7E through its paces, we came to the realization that the scores it produced were comparable to boards based on the i845PE chipset. This should be expected since we did all of the testing using the same GeForce 4 Ti 4600 video card rather than the built-in Intel Extreme Graphics. In essence, then, we were using this board as an I845PE board, and this was done simply to level the playing field with the other boards. A quick test using the on-board graphics produced scores that were anything but "extreme" and most gamers and other video-dependent users should look into adding a more powerful video solution. For those whose needs do not require such a card, the Abit BG7E represents a complete package, with video, audio, and LAN capabilities already available, and all for one price of about $110 or so. This makes it a perfect choice for offices and other departments looking to get a performance-based board without all the add-on prices for additional components. All things considered, this is another great entry from Abit, and we give it an 8 on the HotHardware Heat Meter.
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