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 CPUs. 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 makes for a good benchmark of internal processing.

Although the Duron 850 gains very little over the 800MHz variant, the gap in performance between the Duron and Celeron gets that much wider. Fear not, for we will revisit 3D WinBench 2000 in our overclocking tests.

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!).

In Windows 98 the new Duron holds the lead over the lesser clocked Celeron but we ran into a repeatable but unexplained anomaly in the Windows 2000 scores on this an a few other benchmarks: The Duron 800 outperforms its faster brother as well as the similarly clocked Celeron. We are still investigating these results but as they are repeatable, we've included them along with our comments.