AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.2GHz & Duron 800MHz

Content Creation 2000 shows much less of a performance improvement than what we've seen in the previous tests, the 1.2GHz Athlon offers only a 9% boost in spite of its 20% clock increase.

You can only do certain things so fast before you start running into principles of diminishing returns, the tests exemplified by Content Creation Winstone 2000 (Office applications, image editing/creation, HTML editing/viewing, etc...) are obviously not stressing the CPUs the most.

Here the Duron is able to play quite a bit of catch-up to its bigger brother, as the Duron 800 is no more than 3% slower than an 800MHz Athlon. This is where the Duron truly shines, as a cost effective home computing solution able to offer Pentium III and Athlon class performance, at a very reduced price.

Even High End Winstone 99 isn't able to gain more than an 8% increase in performance over the 1GHz Athlon.

For the first time we are implementing the latest version of SPECviewperf in our CPU reviews, v6.1.2. This version of the benchmark includes updated versions of all of the viewsets as well as adds the MedMCAD-01 viewset benchmark. For information on all of these tests and what they do, visit the SPECviewperf information site.