Business Winstone 2001
Now the fit hits the shan. Biz Winstone tests performance in general office applications, where the 845 is likely to make its living. This test is also usually a good indicator of overall system performance, especially where "light use" patterns are concerned (in other words, not gaming, heavy computation, or multimedia).

Only three Winstone points separate the three P4 chipsets. The P4X266 shows its strength by turning in the best overall score, but the 845 also does reasonably well, considering.

Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone is a little more up our alley around here. It tests audio and image processing apps, where performance is at more of a premium.

This time around, the 850 comes out on top, but just barely; the P4X266 is right there with it. The 845 again takes up the rear, but here the performance gap is wider. The Pentium 4's already relatively low clock-for-clock performance in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the 845 makes the situation even more pronounced. Those who buy computers solely on clock speed ratings could miscalculate badly in evaluating 845-based systems.

LAME MP3 encoding
The LAME MP3 encoder is at the center of my digital world. Let's see how our contenders stack up when converting a 50+ megabyte WAV music file into an MP3.

LAME isn't a particularly memory-intensive test, and it shows. The difference between the three Pentium 4 chipsets here is only 1.5 seconds.