Another good system level benchmark that we've used before and are doing again is Bapco's SYSmark 2000. The benchmark offers a strong set of twelve application benchmarks covering a wide range of Internet Content Creation and Productivity application categories. According to Bapco, the strength of SYSmark 2000 lies in its workloads, which reflect actual usage of real applications within the new computing paradigms.

SYSmark shows the Athlon 1.2GHz again in the lead, though not by a large margin over the 1GHz Pentium III. The 1.13GHz Pentium III, which is no longer available, did manage to outperform the 1.2GHz Athlon, though a non-shipping chip cannot be fairly compared. The Athlon 1.2GHz repeatedly failed to run SYSmark under Windows 2000. The machine would crash and the Windows 2000 installation would corrupt.