3. DHCAT At Ground Level: Six Scenarios And 24 Assessments

Each scenario is comprised of anywhere from 3 to 5 individual assessments, each of which is intended to capture some aspect of overall system media handling capability and performance at the task or tasks involved. Each has a name that is intended to describe its role in the overall assessment scheme.

In the next table, we summarize this information, to show you what goes on in each assessment for all the various scenarios

Intel manages to capture all of this information pretty effectively in a legend that appears in one of the DHCAT results screens. In the images that follow, we present what normally appears as a two-column table as two separate images to better fit our Web page layout.

By looking over the icons shown in the legend you get a sense of the full range of activities that DHCAT may someday embrace: those covered in the preceding table are just a subset that focuses on video encoding, decoding, streaming, playback and recording.

Hopefully, the real emphasis in the assessments is clear: each named scenario starts out with a single related activity that's hopefully easy to accomplish, then piles on the parallel tasks to give all the media PCs a serious workout. None of the PC builds we've tested so far has been able to attain passing scores on every assessment in every scenario, and most can handle only the first item or two within any given scenario. That said, both the 4600+ and 4800+ AMD builds failed to attain passing scores in more than half the scenarios, while both the Intel T7200 and T7600 managed at least one passing score in every scenario.