The purpose of using the 3D Winbench Processor benchmark was to test the rendering capabilities of the CPU. It uses the "NULL" device when testing/simulating T&L routines of a 3D application. This puts a CPU's floating-point unit to work determining CPU speed and eliminating the video card as a bottleneck. Intel's Pentium III's have historically performed well.

With SSE and a full-speed on-die cache, the Pentium III is able to maintain a scaleable clock for clock advantage. The 1GHz Pentium III scores 1.91, which is the fastest yet seen.

Content Creation 2000

The tests here warrant attention because complex Adobe PhotoShop 5.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 7.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0, Netscape Navigator 4.6 and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge scripts are run. 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. At 36.3 the Intel 1GHz Pentium III and the boost it gets from the RDRAM platform means it pips an equivalently clocked 1GHz Athlon, which scored 35.5.