As a supplement to the Ziff Davis 3D Winbench 2000 CPU test, we've also thrown in MadOnion's 3D Mark CPU test from 3D Mark 2000 (run at 1024x768), which focuses on the floating-point-intensive 3D geometry portion of the graphics pipeline.

It's a close run thing at the 1GHz mark (401 for the Athlon and 397 for the Pentium III). Intel's new 1.13GHz' extra “oomph” in the MHz department obviously comes out top for now with 436, which matches the expected 10% performance gain over the 1GHz Pentium III. A job well done here…

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. Content Creation Winstone 2000 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.

The 1.13GHz Pentium III came out top in Content Creation 2000, pipping the Athlon 1GHz (which in turn edged ahead of the 1GHz Pentium III).