WorldBench overall performance
WorldBench uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications. It then produces an overall score. WorldBench also spits out individual results for its component application tests, allowing us to compare performance in each. We'll look at the overall score, and then we'll show individual application results alongside the results from some of our own application tests.

There's a spread of more than ten points between the fastest and slowest configurations in WorldBench, with the RAID 5 arrays trailing by a significant margin. Looking at the overall results, the ICH7R has a slight edge in single-drive, RAID 1, and RAID 10 performance, while the nForce4 has a small lead with RAID 5 and with one of our RAID 0 configs. WorldBench's results for individual application tests should shed more light on how thing stack up.

Multimedia editing and encoding

MusicMatch Jukebox

Windows Media Encoder

Adobe Premiere

VideoWave Movie Creator

Of WorldBench's multimedia editing and encoding tests, Premiere is the only application to really show a significant difference in performance between the various RAID levels. RAID 0 proves faster than any other configuration, but RAID 10/0+1 and even RAID 1 aren't far behind. Neither are our single-drive configurations, for that matter. RAID 5 is another story. Parity overhead appears to be crippling RAID 5's performance in Premiere, resulting in scores that are much slower than our other configurations.

The Premiere test crawls on our RAID 5 array with both the Intel and NVIDIA systems, but NVIDIA's implementation is clearly faster. NVIDIA also has a slight lead over Intel with some of the other array configurations, although those results only differ by a few seconds.