6. SYSmark 2004 SE (Second Edition)

SYSmark 2004 SE is all about performance. Battery life is not a consideration here, so when we test a laptop or notebook under SYSmark 2004 SE, it is plugged into the wall running on AC power. SYSmark 2004 is designed to be used with laptops, notebooks and PCs.

Like MobileMark 2005, SYSmark 2004 SE runs a series of applications using scripts; it includes two benchmarking scenarios:

Internet content creation Office productivity

The Internet content creation benchmarking scenario is divided into three test groups:

3D creation 2D creation Web publication

The Office productivity scenario is also divided into three test groups:

Communication (email, calendar and web browsing) Document creation Data analysis

The Internet content creation benchmark uses Adobe's After Effects 5.5, Photoshop 7.01 and Premier 6.5, Discreet's 3ds max 5.1, Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX and Micromedia Flash MX, Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder 9 Series, Network Associates' McAfee VirusScan 7.0 and WinZip Computing's WinZip 8.1.

The office productivity benchmark uses Adobe's Acrobat 5.0.5, Microsoft's Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word 2002 SP2, ScanSoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6, Network Associates' McAfee VirusScan 7.0 and WinZip Computing's WinZip 8.1.

Starting a SYSmark 2004 SE official benchmark run

As with MobileMark 2005, SYSmark 2004 SE performance ratings are based on response time: the time required to complete an operation such as the time between a mouse click that initiates a global replace operation in Word and the time the completion dialog box is displayed. Also in line with MobileMark 2005, test scores are relative to a reference score of 100 based on tests using a calibration system.