With five separate benchmark tests plus battery life testing, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance. PCMark 8 is the complete PC benchmark for home and business.

PCMark 8 includes five new benchmark tests, each designed around a specific scenario. Choose the benchmark that best matches the device being tested, or run all five for a complete picture of the device's performance. Each benchmark produces a score you can use to compare systems as well as detailed results for gaining a deep understanding of performance during each individual workload.

Home Test

Workloads that reflect common tasks for a typical home user. These workloads have low computational requirements making PCMark 8 Home suitable for testing the performance of low-cost tablets, notebooks and desktops. Home includes workloads for web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat. The results are combined to give a PCMark 8 Home score for your system.

Creative Test

Workloads typical of enthusiasts and professionals who work with media and entertainment content. With more demanding requirements than the Home benchmark, this benchmark is suitable for mid-range computer systems. PCMark 8 Creative includes web browsing, photo editing, video editing, group video chat, media transcoding, and gaming workloads.

Work Test

Measures your system's ability to perform basic office work tasks, such as writing documents and browsing websites. The Work benchmark is suitable for measuring the performance of typical office PC systems that lack media capabilities. For more demanding office use, run the Creative benchmark test. The results from each workload are combined to give an overall PCMark 8 Work score for your system.

Storage Test

Measures the performance of SSDs, HDDs and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games. You can test the system drive or any other recognised storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices.

Applications Test

Measures system performance using popular applications from the Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office. You can choose which tests to run based on the applications installed on your system. Each test automatically steps through a series of actions such as opening, editing and saving a file. The results are used to calculate the PCMark 8 Applications scores for the system.

Battery Life Test

PCMark 8 improves on previous versions by including new battery life testing tools. The Home, Creative, Work and Applications benchmarks can be used for battery life testing. Choose Battery Life mode to loop the benchmark until the battery is almost empty to accurately measure battery life under real-world conditions. PCMark 8 even supports external instrumentation with 3rd party power measurement equipment.

What's New:

This is a minor update for PCMark 8. Benchmark scores are not affected.

Improved

  • Systeminfo updated to version 5.10 for improved compatibility with the latest hardware.

Fixed

  • Improved OpenCL driver detection.
  • Results now show the correct OpenCL device used for the Photo Editing test.


Adobe Applications benchmark

  • Adobe Applications benchmark has been updated to version 2.0. Scores should not be compared with earlier versions.
  • The After Effects test output has been changed to uncompressed AVI format as Adobe CC no longer supports output to compressed Windows Media Video format.
  • Use Compatibility mode to compare scores with historical result data, (also requires an older version of Adobe software that supports Windows Media Video).

Storage benchmark

  • The Storage and Expanded Storage benchmarks have been updated to version 2.0. Scores should not be compared with earlier versions.
  • The tests now provide better support for NVMe drives. Scores from NVMe drives will improve in some cases. The faster the drive, the bigger the difference. Other types of drive are unaffected.

Professional Edition only

  • Command line now offers temp path selection.
  • XML output now shows battery life in minutes not seconds for more intuitive results.