While we normally reserve 3D WinBench 2000 for our illustrious video card reviews, we have also found that the included processor test is quite useful to stress the architecture of today's CPUs. Games have historically been very sensitive to L2 cache speed rather than size, so the brief game scenes from WinBench 2000 run on a "null" software renderer makes for a good benchmark of internal processing.

The power of AMD's newest Athlon processor is evident in both Windows ME and Windows 2000, where it surpasses the 1.5GHz Pentium 4. Of course, we have yet to see any benchmarks optimized for the SSE2 instruction set, but for now, the Athlon holds the torch.

As a supplement to 3D WinBench 2000, we have also run MadOnion's 3D Mark CPU test, which focuses on the floating point-intensive geometry portion of the CPU. Rather than using hardware T&L, each CPU was set for its respective pipeline optimization (SSE and 3Dnow!). Unfortunately, the recently released 3D Mark 2001 does not include a processor test, so 3D Mark 2000 will remain in our processor benchmarking repertoire for a while longer.

Our 3D WinBench 2000 results are re-affirmed, and both the Athlon 1.2 and 1.33GHz processors exceed the Pentium 4 in performance (in Windows ME), while the Athlon 1.33GHz processor takes the gold under Windows 2000.