Benchmark Results: Applications
We tried to limit today’s benchmarks to applications that are used in a typical office environment, such as word processing, Web browsing, and database management. But because the benchmark we use for checking MS Office and Internet Explorer performance isn’t compatible with the Chrome9 HC3 graphics driver of the VIA Nano platform, we were forced to chose the most “office friendly” benchmarks from our high-end system test set.
Anyone working with 96MB TIF images probably calls his or her office a studio, so the traditional office tasks of resizing or cropping an image don’t take nearly this long. On the other hand, those who already experience operational delays when using traditional desktop processors would probably find even less performance unacceptable.
Recent versions of AVG anti-virus appear extremely friendly towards multi-core processing, giving the Atom 330 a substantial performance lead over the single-core Celeron 430. The Nano U1700’s slow single core is poorly suited to the task.
Video conversion isn’t the most common office application, but we have seen downsized videos attached to organizational newsletters. A marginal lead in DivX and a much larger lead in Xvid favor the single-core Celeron, while the dual-core Atom is still significantly faster than the Nano.
WinRAR almost perfectly reflects CPU clock speed, rather than architecture, while WinZip appears optimized towards the desktop CPU.