AMD Athlon 800

Two new Benchmarks

The recent release of BAPCo's SYSMark 2000 and Ziff Davis' Content Creation Winstone 2000 will also cloud the issue of performance as well, since the Pentium III seems to naturally fare better under these newer benchmarks than it did in the past against the Athlon in SYSMark 98 and Winstone 99.

SYSMark 2000 and Content Creation Winstone 2000 are both steps forward in the benchmarking arena. SYSMark 2000 updates the extremely out of date application versions present in SYSMark 98 to their latest counterparts while continuing to provide a very comprehensive set of business, professional and content creation application tests. Content Creation Winstone 2000 received a small introduction to the AnandTech crowd in our review of the Athlon 750, and, since then, it has become a part of our standard CPU performance evaluation test suite. The Content Creation Winstone 2000 is a simple one-run test that simulates real world usage through the multitasking use of six content creation applications. This test is light years ahead of the old Business Winstone 99 that we were analyzing performance by for so long, there is only so much of a performance boost you need under Microsoft Word until it becomes excessive (running spell check can only get so fast).

Currently, Intel has a very strong influence in the benchmark industry, with close ties to BAPCo and ZDBOp; it is time that AMD tried to attain a presence in benchmarks that is just as strong. Seeing the lack of Athlon-specific optimizations in applications is disappointing to say the least. Hopefully as time progresses, we will continue to see more Athlon-optimizations placed in applications.

3DMark 2000 - NOT synthetic a CPU benchmark

MadOnion, the company formerly known as FutureMark (don't ask questions, just accept it), has also released their updated fall benchmark, 3DMark 2000. 3DMark 2000, like its predecessor, features a 'CPU test' which is actually a very useful tool. The test runs through the frame rate tests of 3DMark but in a low resolution thus signifying the performance of the CPU over that of the video card. It is the same basis we use behind running Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament at 640 x 480 in CPU reviews -- this way we eliminate possible video card bottlenecks.

However, one clarification must be made when calling it a 'CPU test' -- the test does not test how well one CPU stacks up against another; instead, it illustrates how well a particular CPU can drive a specific video card. A CPU scoring higher than another in 3DMark 2000's CPU test does not mean that it is the faster overall CPU, it means that, provided that both systems are using the same configuration with the exact same video card, the higher scoring CPU is better at handling the transforming and lighting calculations offloaded to it by that particular graphics card.

Why does this matter? A perfect example of being fooled by this test would be when using the GeForce, which is currently forced in to AGP 1X mode by default on the Athlon using the latest Detonator drivers. Under 3DMark 2000's CPU test, a Pentium III 750 on a BX board comes dangerously close to beating out an Kryotech Athlon running at 1000MHz. Don't you just love how benchmarks can be deceiving?

In essence, 3DMark 2000 is a fine benchmark, just be aware of what the results are portraying, as it's not the same thing as a Winbench CPUMark. For this reason, we will be illustrating gaming performance using two video cards, one using NVIDIA's GeForce, and one using the TNT2 Ultra.