Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The PCMark test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance during typical desktop usage. This is the most important test since it returns the official PCMark score for your system.

Lightweight test
The Lightweight test contains a collection of workloads to measure the performance of systems unable to run the PCMark test. On entry-level desktops, tablets and notebooks, only one application tends to be in active use at a time and it is rare to run computationally heavy applications. The Lightweight test is ideal for benchmarking systems using the Windows 7 Starter operating system and is also compatible with Windows Vista. At the end of the test your system is given a Lightweight test score.

Entertainment test
Entertainment test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in entertainment scenarios. Individual workloads include recording, viewing, streaming and transcoding TV shows and movies, importing, organizing and browsing new music and several gaming related tasks. If the target system is not capable of running DirectX 10 workloads then those tests are skipped. At the end of the test your system is given an Entertainment test score.

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

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 test your system is given a Productivity test score.

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

Storage test
The Storage test is a collection of workloads that isolate the performance of the PC's storage system. You can choose to test other storage devices in addition to the system drive. At the end of the test your system is given a Storage test score.

what's New:

PCMark 7 has been updated to version 1.4.0 and is now fully compatible with Windows 8. Please note that benchmark scores ARE affected by the changes in this update.

You should not compare scores from PCMark 7 v1.4.0 with any previous version of PCMark 7

Improvements

  • Enhanced accuracy in video playback drawn frames measurement.
  • In addition to the standard result, PCMark 7 Storage tests now report additional "raw" results where the metric idle values have been excluded from the score calculation.
  • New troubleshooting option for hardware acceleration of video transcoding - "Enable hardware accelerated video transcoding" checkbox on the Help tab.
  • Improved logging.

Compatibility

  • Now fully compatible with Windows 8.
  • The Web Browsing test has been completely rewritten to avoid compatibility issues with Windows 8. The previous implementation was based on Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), the new one is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application. The heavy lifting in the test is still done by the WebBrowser2 control. Benchmark scores are affected, in most cases going up by a few percent.
  • SystemInfo updated to version 4.15 for Windows 8 compatibility.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed issues in video transcoding tests and added transcoding output file validation. These changes affect benchmark scores.
  • Fixed a data compressibility bug in the storage workloads. Benchmark scores are affected in configurations that use data compression at the hardware level.