PCMark 7 Tests

PCMark 7 is Futuremark’s successor to PCMark Vantage. The full suite of tests comprises seven different sequences with more than 25 sub-tests that exercise your system’s abilities in storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. It was developed with input from the designers, engineers and product managers at AMD, Compal, Dell, Hitachi GST, HP, Intel, NVIDIA, Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital and many other well-known companies.

For this benchmark I chose the PCMark test, which provides a number indicating total system performance, as well as the Productivity, Creativity, Entertainment, and Computation test suites.

Creativity Test

The Creativity test contains a collection of workloads to measure the system performance in typical creativity scenarios. Individual tests include viewing, editing, transcoding and storing photos and videos. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Creativity test score.

• Storage
• importing pictures
• video editing
• Image manipulation
• Video transcoding – high quality

Computation Test

The Computation test contains a collection of workloads that isolate the computation performance of the system. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Computation test score.

• Video transcoding – downscaling
• Video transcoding – high quality
• Image manipulation

Productivity Test

The Productivity test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in typical productivity scenarios. Individual workloads include loading web pages and using home office applications. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given a Productivity test score. The Productivity test consists of:

• Storage
• Windows Defender
• Starting applications
• Web browsing and decrypting
• Productivity
• Data decryption
• Text editing

Entertainment Test

The Entertainment test measures your PC performance in common entertainment scenarios such as recording, viewing, streaming and transcoding TV shows and movies, importing, organizing and browsing new music and playing games. Some workloads require DirectX 10.

It’s important to note that since PCMark 7 was designed as a system test, the scores are dependent on the configuration of the entire system being tested, including things like the memory, hard disk, and graphics cards used: it’s not an isolated CPU test like most of the other benchmarks I’m using in this review. However, since all other hardware (motherboard, video card, memory, hard disk, etc.) was identical, with only the CPUs being changed, any performance differences here can be attributed to differences in CPU performance.

In the next section I run everyone’s favorite benchmark: CINEBENCH!