X-bit labs

PCMark Vantage: New Complex System Performance Benchmark (page 3)

Category: Other

by Doors4ever , Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 10/18/2007 | 08:06 AM ]

Launching the Benchmark and Adjusting the Settings

The main program window with a broad promo banner at the bottom looks as follows:

I have to admit that the new benchmarking suite became much more commercial: you see ad banners in the program windows, in the actual tests and even in the score reports.

PCMark Vantage Advanced and Professional allow you to change the settings from defaults to something else.

These versions also allow you to select all tests you wish to run. Each test is provided with a brief description for your convenience. The full testing cycle takes about one and a half hours.

Now let’s take a closer look at the available testing suites.

The basic testing suite that is available in all PCMark Vantage versions is called PCMark Suite. Only this testing suite will provide a PCMark Score. This suite includes the following individual tests:

• CPU Test
  • Data encryption, Data decryption, Data compression, Data decompression
  • CPU image manipulation (compression/decompression/resize)
  • Audio transcoding
  • Video transcoding
  • Text editing
  • Web page rendering
  • Windows Mail
  • Windows Contacts
  • CPU game test
• GPU Test
  • Video playback
  • GPU game test
• HDD Test
  • 6 HDD Tests total
  • HDD Tests use new 4K block size
  • All HDD Tests use RankDisk using Intel’s IPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit
    • WinTrace is used to record the HDD traces
    • AnalyzeTrace is used to analyze precisely what the traces are doing
    • RankDisk: a Futuremark modified version that it is non-destructive and runs in a temporary sandbox file.

All tests included into PCMark Suite are split into several groups:

• Memories 1 & 2
• TV and Movies 1 & 2
• Gaming 1 & 2
• Music 1 & 2
• Communications 1 & 2
• Productivity 1 & 2