The New VIA Cyrix III: The Worlds First 0.15 Micron x86 CPU

Content Creation Performance Explained

Another benchmark we recently started using in place of an older version is Ziff Davis Media's Content Creation Winstone 2001. Much like the switch from Business Winstone 2000 to Business Winstone 2001, the new Content Creation Winstone 2001 makes use of updated applications to further stress our test systems.

Rather than use non-intensive applications like Microsoft Word that Business Winstone 2001 uses, Content Creation Winstone 2001 focuses on more demanding applications. Since many demanding applications are involved in making and modifying Internet content.

Content Creation Winstone 2001 uses Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 8.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0, Netscape Navigator 4.73, and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.5 to simulate common tasks involved in making complex Internet content. On the whole, these applications are very intensive, eating up all the power they can get. The benchmark does multitask, switching applications while running others in the background, a fact that requires even more power. The tasks performed by these applications has been modified from the old version as well, simulating actual computer use even better.

Like Business Winstone 2001, Content Creation Winstone 2001 also incorporates the new scoring method, with repeated runs and reboots between each. Also the same is the scoring methodology. Once again the base machine, in this case a Pentium MMX 233 MHz with 64 MB of memory running Windows NT 4.0, scores a 10 in the benchmark. Therefore, the final benchmark score represents how many times faster the tested computer could finish the operations, times 10.

Let's see how our Cyrix III CPU did in this intensive test.