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Our SYSMark2000 test proved to be an interesting one. The first thing to notice here is that all scores are within 2% of one another, so we're dealing with very, very minor deviations here.

That said, we can make some observations. Firstly, using the controller card seems to have had the largest impact on performance. When we coupled the DiamondMax 60 with the controller, we saw a 1.5% increase in the overall score. This means it's logical to expect that the add-on controller itself improved the D740X's score by 1.5% also. Using that logic, and approximating, we see that using ATA-133 had virtually no effect on performance at all (less than 0.5%). Almost the entire performance gain observed was due to the controller card (possibly a better logic design?), and not due to the ATA-133 bus.

While the D740X has shown itself to be about 10-15% faster than its predecessor in all of our previous tests, here we see that that extra 15% has almost no practical effect on the performance of standard applications. Keep in mind, though, that the DiamondMax Plus 60 was new just a few months ago, so we're comparing the absolute best to the second best here. If you were to compare to a 5 year old hard drive, you'd see some real performance gains.

**Appendix A shows full results from each of the independent tests within SYSMark2000. Each test was conducted three times, and the results averaged.