New from Ziff-Davis, Content Creation 2001 tests warrant attention because complex Adobe PhotoShop 5.5, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 8.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0, Netscape Navigator 4.73 and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.5 scripts are run. Content Creation Winstone 2001 keeps multiple applications open at once and switches among those applications. All of these have 'hot spots', as ZD likes to call them that truly test the system, but the CPU especially. Think of this benchmark as the "Crusher" ZD-equivalent test, which pushes real world programs to their limits (as opposed to Quake II timedemo1) on a system level.

Last week, when we reviewed the Celeron 800, it was apparent that the new 100MHz bus setting really gave the processor a boost in this Content Creation benchmark. By raising the operating frequency of the Duron 50MHz, AMD has pulled away slightly.

We noticed that the Windows 2000 scores were slightly askew, so we ran the benchmark several times to verify. Sure enough, we came up with the same results (Duron 800 besting the 850). At this point, we haven't nailed down a solid explanation for this behavior, considering the benchmark delivers reliable results under Windows 98.