Content Creation Winstone is our first Professional/Office application benchmark that is generally a bit more taxing in areas of system memory bandwidth and disk access.

Content Creation Winstone 2004 Real-World Application Performance

The Veritest Content Creation Winstone 2004 test utilizes the following applications in its benchmark routine, for more information about this test, see this page:

• 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

This test typically has heavily favored the Athlon 64 but the gap is closing somewhat as higher performance DDR2 DRAM is introduced to the Pentium 4 system architecture.  The P5ND2-SLI Deluxe nForce 4 board and the NVIDIA reference nForce 4 board post number in a photo-finish tie and manage to outpace both the i925XE and the i955X based Intel board in this test.  Most likely NVIDIA's DASP Memory Prefetching algorithms off the memory controller are affording the NF4 based P4 boards a small edge here.  The variances are pretty small, however, and we're sure end user experience would be pretty comparable across most all the applications that comprise the CC Winstone test.

PC World's World Bench 5.0: Office XP Module More Real-World Application Performance

PC World Magazine's WorldBench 5.0 consists of a number of performance modules that each utilize one, or a group of, popular applications to gauge performance.  Below we have the results from WB 5's Office XP module, recorded in seconds.  Lower times indicate better performance.

The P5ND2-SLI takes the lead here by a comfortable margin over the either the i925XE or i955X boards. The Athlon 64 nForce 4 based test-bed clocks in a full 20+ seconds behind the Pentium 4 platform versions of the chipset.  What's interesting to see here is that the i955X system is still bringing up the rear as far as the Pentium 4 scores go.  Perhaps Intel's D955XBK desktop board is simply tuned for stability rather than all out performance like the nForce 4 and i925XE motherboards.  Regardless, all the motherboards involved here were completely stable in our hours of testing, including the Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe.