Results

Beginning things with the productivity benchmarks, we cue up PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004.  Business Winstone 2004 runs a suite of many popular office programs, measuring their speed and generating an overall score.  The programs it uses are Microsoft Access 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft FrontPage 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002, Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003 and WinZip 8.1.

PC Magazine's Content Creation 2004 is also a suite of office apps but focuses more on design and creativity.  The programs run to generate a final score as shown below are 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 and Steinberg™ WaveLab™ 4.0f.

So far we haven't seen any real performance differences between our boards but that is about to change a bit.  Using SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Memory Bandwidth benchmark, let's take a look at how well the K8SLI handles it memory bandwidth. 

This was a bit surprising.  However, we are comparing the Albatron K8SLI based on a nForce4 chipset with another board that is based around the nForce4 Ultra chipset.