PCMark 7 is a new benchmark offering complete PC performance testing for Windows 7. PCMark 7 includes 7 separate tests combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming.

Hardware innovations like solid state drives (SSDs), and new form factors such as netbooks and tablets are greatly increasing the range of PC performance available to businesses and home users. With so much choice available, PCMark 7 is an essential and easy to use tool to test and compare PC performance accurately and reliably across a wide range of usage scenarios.

New tests

PCMark 7 includes more than 25 individual workloads combined into 7 separate tests to give different views of system performance.

The PCMark test measures overall system performance and returns an official PCMark score.

The Lightweight test measures the capabilities of entry level systems unable to run the full PCMark test.

The Entertainment test measures system performance in entertainment, media and gaming scenarios.

The Creativity test measures performance in typical creativity scenarios involving images and video.

The Productivity test measures system performance scenarios using the Internet and office applications.

The Computation test contains workloads that isolate the computation performance of the system.

The Storage test contains workloads that isolate the performance of the PC’s storage system.

A new online service

PCMark 7’s online service, located at http://www.pcmark.com offers improved performance and streamlined functionality. The online service allows users to validate, store, share and compare their benchmark results with those from other users around the world.

Free Basic Edition
PCMark 7 Basic Edition is available as a free download. It offers an unlimited number of runs without expiry or registration.

New in this version:

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.
- Enable or disable hardware accelerated video transcoding from the Help tab for troubleshooting.
- 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 compression bug in the storage workloads. Benchmark scores are affected in configurations that use data compression at the hardware level.