VIA Responds with KT400A, Five Months Later

Content Creation Performance

For "Content Creation" performance we use two benchmarks - the new Content Creation Winstone 2003 and Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002. We start with Content Creation Winstone 2003 and a description of the benchmark from its creators, VeriTest:

Multimedia 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 on Windows 2000 (SP2 or higher), Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows XP. Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 uses the following applications:

Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0
Adobe® Premiere® 6.0
Macromedia® Director 8.5.1
Macromedia® Dreamweaver 4
Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 7.01.00.3055
Netscape® 6.2.3
NewTek's LightWave® 7.5
Sonic Foundry® Sound Forge® 6.0

Following the lead of real users, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 keeps multiple applications open at once and switches among those applications. Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 is a single large test that runs the above applications through a series of scripted activities and returns a single score. Those activities focus on what we call "hot spots," periods of activity that make your PC really work--the times where you're likely to see an hourglass or a progress bar.

Content Creation Performance Content Creation Winstone 2003 (Score in Winstones - Higher is Better) NVIDIA nForce2 (333/DualDDR333) VIA KT400A (333/DDR333) 40.9 40.2 | 0 | 8 | 16 | 25 | 33 | 41 | 49

The mature nForce2 platform has less than a 2% performance advantage over VIA's reference board in CCWS2K3. We can only assume that retail boards will offer similar if not better performance to what we're seeing from VIA's reference board.

SYSMark 2002 isn't the world's best CPU benchmark for comparing the Athlon XP to the Pentium 4, but it serves us beautifully as a CPU-independent platform comparison. Here's a list of the applications found in the Internet Content Creation suite of the benchmark:

Adobe Photoshop® 6.01
Adobe Premiere® 6.0
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1
Macromedia Dreamweaver 4
Macromedia Flash 5

Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 (Score in SYSMarks - Higher is Better) NVIDIA nForce2 (333/DualDDR333) VIA KT400A (333/DDR333) 334 331 | 0 | 67 | 134 | 200 | 267 | 334 | 401

Once again, a negligible difference in performance (less than 1% in this case) - the KT400A is just as fast as the nForce2 running in DualDDR333 mode.