AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1 GHz / 800 MHz

With this review, we've replaced Windows NT 4.0 with Windows 2000. With Content Creation Winstone 2000, we can see a performance boost across the board that Windows 2000 provides thanks to its NT roots.

The Pentium III teamed with 820 + RDRAM manages to steal the lead from the Thunderbird, while the VIA 133A moves up a bit in the rankings to overtake the non-overclocked BX. We still see both Athlon models well ahead of the Pentium III when compared on the VIA platforms, emphasizing that the Athlon is probably limited by its VIA chipset. The performance delta between Thunderbird and the original Athlon is larger than under Windows 98SE, but still relatively small.