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| ZDBench Winstones |
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Put away those games, and do some work! |
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Content Creation Winstone 2002:
Content Creation Winstone is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running top, Windows-based, 32-bit, multimedia content creation applications. Following the lead of real users, Content Creation Winstone 2002 keeps multiple applications open at once and switches among those applications. Content Creation Winstone 2002 is a single large test that runs the above applications through a series of scripted activities and returns a single score.
Below is a list of applications that Content Creation Winstone 2002 uses to come up with its rating:
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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) |
Business Winstone 2002: Business Winstone 2002, which was released in August 2002, has the sleek lines of new application versions, backed by the power of updated workloads under the hood. Highlights include the Business Winstone debut of Office XP applications, as well as larger workloads to make the benchmark hot spots--those times when you're likely to see an hourglass or a progress bar--even hotter. All of this ensures that Business Winstone 2002 remains strictly up to date and will provide meaningful test scores for the latest crop of desktop PCs. 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 AntiVirusTM from Symantec -
Netscape® 6.2.1 | As we have seen in past review, the VIA P4PB is not well suited to the Winstones, and falls far behind the rest of the pack. The Abit BH7 put up a great showing, coming in second in the CCWS and tied for first with the MSI 655 Max in the BWS benchmark. Both scores moved up appreciably when the system was overclocked, ranging from a 10-15% increase. All in all, it is evident that the BH7 stands its ground in both the gaming and business application realms.
The Abit BH7 had a lot of history and hype to live up to, and it certainly satisfied. While not as groundbreaking as the BH6 was in its day, the BH7 does provide a powerful yet stable platform to build upon, and we were able to overclock it without any major issues. Some may find fault in the sparse contents of the provided bundle, but we felt that in this case, builders will be looking more for the board itself than any extra brackets or assorted goodies. Keeping the extras to a minimum allows the BH7 to be found for as cheap as $90 on most search engines, a great price for a capable board. The only real detriment that we found with the Abit BH7 was the odd implementation of the Serial ATA channel, which effectively knocked out the second IDE port. It might have been best to simply not travel down that road, and rather looked into providing ATA RAID support instead. Nevertheless, this was a stable board that performed well, and came with features such as on-board audio and LAN. It's safe to say the "BH" tradition is alive and well. We give the Abit BH7 a 9 on the HotHardware Heat Meter...
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