We've adopted this benchmark from ZD as a replacement to Winstone 99. We feel 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 (argh no IE?) 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 2 timedemo1). Just like SYSMark 2000, the CC2000 is a good indicator of just how well an overall platform performs.
This test has always been a close run thing- even with the Athlon "Classic". This time around not much changes, the Pentium III 1GHz and its RDRAM-based i820 is still piping its competition to the podium at 36.3 (incidentally the results soon to be published by AMD were run on systems using 256MB of memory, which we have verified also at 39.6).
Perhaps somewhat alarmingly, the KT133 with its Athlon "Thunderbird" 1GHz versus the older KX133 1GHz platform shows off a slight backtrack in performance. Will later revisions of the KT133 (admittedly we did test on the first shipping KT rev.) be able to edge ahead of the older KX133 platform? In the commercial and business sector where CC2000 tends to be a make or break decision for some IT managers out there looking to outfit their employer's offices, it won't look great if the old Athlon "Classic" platform beats the new one (even if it is by just a little).