PCMark 8 Tests

Futuremark’s PCMark 8 Professional is predicated on “real-world relevance”. While the professional version offers users the freedom to construct any test scenario they want, a series of pre-configured test setups is included. AMD suggested that the Home test would show their product to advantage, so it’s the one I ran.

The Home test runs scripts for web browsing, writing, photo editing, video chat, and “casual gaming”. Each test is run three times and the results averaged. Although the tests don’t seem particularly heinous, this single benchmark is the reason my manual overclock limit on the FX-8320E CPU was 4.5gHz: because while the CPU would pass every other benchmark at 4.6gHz, it would always crash or freeze during the PCMark 8 Home test.

So there’s that.

After running all the tests, PCMark 8 generates a “score” representing the performance across all of the tests. However, rather than simply reporting this score, I’m showing all the test results, because some of them are interesting.

In this first set of tests, all the times are reported in seconds (the Writing scores have been divided by 10 to scale to this graph, so for “0.47” read “4.7”), with lower scores denoting better performance. The Intel CPU’s only win is in the Writing test; and the manually overclocked FX-8320E beats the top-tier FX-9590 in every single test. 

Looking at the next set of scores is a little confusing: for Video Chat #2, lower scores are better, while higher scores are better for the other three results. The Core i3-4360 wins the Casual Gaming score by a huge margin, and this is probably what gives it the overall win as measured by the Combined Score. Still, note that the Intel CPU’s combined score is less than 9% better than the stock-clocked FX-8320E score…and that’s not much.

Let’s look at some more real-world results in the SPEC APC test in the next section.