VIA Responds with KT400A, Five Months Later

General Usage Performance

Although not as performance-critical as content creation applications, it is the set of every day applications like Office and other general usage programs that the majority of users find themselves interacting with the most, thus performance here is also very important.

We start with VeriTest's Business Winstone 2002:

The Business Winstone tests are "market-centered" tests. Business applications are the popular applications employed by most users every day.

Five Microsoft Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word)
Microsoft Project 2000
Lotus Notes
WinZip 8.0
Norton AntiVirus
Netscape Communicator

General Usage Performance Business Winstone 2002 (Score in Winstones - Higher is Better) NVIDIA nForce2 (333/DualDDR333) VIA KT400A (333/DDR333) 39.9 37.0 | 0 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 32 | 40 | 48

The biggest performance advantage the nForce2 will have over the KT400A exists in business/general usage environments, where NVIDIA's excellent IDE drivers improve performance tremendously. Here the nForce2 holds a nice 8% advantage over the KT400A.

Next we have the Office portion of SYSMark 2002; the applications tested include:

Microsoft Word 2002
Microsoft Excel 2002,
Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
Microsoft Outlook 2002,
Microsoft Access 2002,
Netscape Communicator® 6.0
Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred v.5
WinZip 8.0
McAfee VirusScan 5.13.

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 (Score in SYSMarks - Higher is Better) NVIDIA nForce2 (333/DualDDR333) VIA KT400A (333/DDR333) 215 201 | 0 | 43 | 86 | 129 | 172 | 215 | 258

Here we have a 7% performance advantage in favor of NVIDIA.