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.

When the Pentium 4 launched, AMD's 1.2GHz Athlon significantly outpaced it. Since then, AMD has released their 1.33GHz part, further distancing the Athlon from Intel's Pentium 4 line. Now, at 1.7GHz, Intel has been able to close that gap somewhat, matching the Athlon 1.2GHz under Windows 2000. Granted, none of the applications that comprise Content Creation have been optimized for the SSE2 instruction set.