Futuremark launches PCMark05

PCMark05 is the latest creation from Finnish softwaredeveloper Futuremark. Futuremark is nisched towards benchmarking applications, for consumers to be able to measure their PC’s performance. Since a computer has many uses you can measure performance in so many ways. The 3Dmark-series is perhaps the best known, even we have used this series as a benchmarking utility when running the Swedish overclocking championship. But this time it’s one Futuremark’s lesser known series that has been updated, PCMark.

PCMark05 is the sequel to PCMark04 and brings a numbers of new features to be updated with current standards. In difference to the 3Dmark-series PCMark is nisched towards system performance and a very crucial part of this is of course the processor. PCMark05 is quite different from its precedor here since Futuremark, acoording to current standards, supports multithreading. I.e. there are loads of performance to collect for those with dual cores.

PCMark05 uses a number of tests and then adds up a final PCMark-score. A detailed list of the tests can be found below:

PCMark05 Test Suites:

• System Test Suite: Extensive collection of application-based tests that are relevant in typical home use of a PC; tasks include hard disk drive access, video encoding, audio compression, 2D user interface tasks, 2D graphics memory access, web page rendering, file decryption and encryption, memory access and text editing.


• CPU Test Suite: Includes tests that isolate the performance of the CPU; tasks include file compression and decompression, file encryption and decryption, audio compression and decompression and image decompression;


• Memory Performance Testing: Tests measure the performance of the memory subsystem; these tasks include reading, writing and copying access to data blocks in the L1 cache, L2 cache, and main memory as well as latency tests;


• Graphics Test Suite: Tests measure both 2D and 3D graphics performance of the PC. 2D tasks measure moving and transparent 2D dialog performance, graphics memory performance and video playback performance. 3D tasks exercise pixel shader, vertex shader, fill rate and polygon throughput capabilities for the graphics subsystem;


• Hard Disk Drive Test Suite: Uses disk activity traces from real-life tasks; these tests isolate the performance of the hard disk drive. Disk activities measured include Windows® XP startup, application loading, file writing, virus scanning and general disk usage.

More information on PCMark05 can be found at Futuremark’s homepage. The program can be downloaded from our filearchive.

– Download PCMark05 Build 1.0.1 (73.53MB)