Ziff-Davis' Content Creation 2000 suite stresses entire systems as hard disks, memory bandwidth and CPU performance all serve as large factors. Adobe PhotoShop 5.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 7.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0, Netscape Navigator 4.6 and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge scripts are run in a multi-tasking environment to simulate real-world Internet content creation.

Content Creation 2000 is a good conglomeration of software that has not been optimized for the Pentium 4, and the scores reflect this. Since the integer unit of the Pentium 4 isn't as strong as the Pentium III, we see AMD's 1.2GHz Thunderbird take the lead. If you were looking for a significant performance gain in Content Creation applications you'd be better off hiring a secretary that types more than 75 words per minute.

On a related note, our tests without DMA enabled resulted in scores more than 25% below the above numbers. For content creation applications, it appears as though your hard drive will make a bigger difference than a shiny new processor.

Those of you who are running under Windows 2000 should know that the current Service Pack does not support the ATA-100 protocol. We have heard rumors that when Service Pack 3 is released, support will be incorporated for both Intel and AMD platforms.