PCMag Business Winstone 2004

It looks like PCMag's Business Winstone likes the lower latency. It comes in at almost a full 2 points ahead of the 925XE so for discerning desktop power users, the nForce 4 is worth looking at also for functionality beyond gaming.

PCMag Multimedia Winstone 2004

Multimedia Winstone is a different affair with the nForce 4 OCZ board taking the lead. All the results are relatively close so it is hard to say if platform differences are responsible for what is seen or if it merely testing variation. If the media encoding results below are any indication, it would lean more towards the latter.

MP3 Encoding

Three seconds over 10, 11 minutes seperate the top dog from last place. Chalking this one up to statistical variation. As seen in many of our Athlon 64 benchmarks, MP3 encoding seems almost strictly processor bound. DASP, low latencies, more memory bandwidth is not making a lot of difference here.

XViD Encoding

Again differences of merely a few short seconds seperate first from last. We're looking at a 2% difference in speed between first and last but further analysis seems more like nitpicking more than any quantitative judgement in which hardware combination is fastest.

MPEG2 Encoding

There is not much more to say here that has not just been said. For those keeping score, the ABIT 925XE does pull up ahead by the hair of its chinny chin chin.