BAPco's recently released SysMark 2001 differs from the two preceding benchmarks in that it measures response time from unique Content Creation and Office productivity scenarios. As such, realistic execution speeds are built-in to more accurately represent how day-to-day jobs are carried out. The applications that make up the SysMark 2001 suite are: Adobe Photoshop 6.0, Adobe Premiere 6.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, Macromedia Flash 5, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft Outlook 2000, Microsoft Access 2000, Netscape Communicator 6.0, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred v.5, WinZip 8.0, and McAfee VirusScan 5.13.

Unfortunately, we were unable to secure an Athlon 1.33GHz system for which to run SysMark 2001 on. As soon as we can get our hands on one, we'll update the SysMark 2001 scores.

For the time being, it is nice to see how well the Pentium 4 scales from 1.3 to 1.7GHz. Furthermore, the Pentium 4 is able to display its strength in the Content Creation test where gratuitous bandwidth, SSE2 optimizations and a strong floating-point unit lend the processor to an impressive score. Conversely, it isn't difficult to see where the deep, 20-stage pipeline of the Pentium 4 negatively affects performance in office-based applications that possess difficult-to-predict integer-dependant code.

In nearly all of the applications we have tested, the Pentium 4 performs much better in Windows 2000 than in Millennium Edition. Because Windows ME contains 16-bit code, the Pentium 4 take a little longer to process it, and thus doesn't perform as well as the strictly 32-bit Windows 2000 environment.