While we normally reserve 3D WinBench 2000 for our illustrious video card reviews, we have also found that the included processor test is quite useful to stress the architecture of today's CPU's. Games have historically been very sensitive to L2 cache speed rather than size, so the brief game scenes from WinBench 2000 run on a "null" software renderer make for a good benchmark of internal processing.

Although the increased bus speed of the Celeron is apparent from our results, the Duron maintains a definitive lead. We would suspect that a gaming processor test is more sensitive to the small instruction and data caches than front side bus bandwidth.

As a supplement to 3D WinBench 2000, we have also run MadOnion's 3D Mark CPU test, which focuses on the floating point-intensive geometry portion of the CPU. Rather than using hardware T&L, each CPU was set for its respective pipeline optimization (SSE and 3Dnow!).

The Celeron and Duron exchange blows under 3D Mark 2000. In Windows 98, the Celeron scrapes by with a two-point victory, while the Duron takes Windows 2000 with a 21-point lead.