8. PCMark05

PCMark05 puts all its emphasis on brute performance and assumes test units are plugged into a wall socket. PCMark05 includes an overall system test suite, along with test suites for individual system components including: CPU, RAM, graphics and hard disk(s). If one part of the test suite won't run or fails during execution, that portion of the test contributes zero points to the overall PCMark05 score.

Point scores for PCMark scale in a range from 1,200 to 5,500 points. Both the lower (1,200) and upper (5,500) ends of this scale are based on results obtained from actual reference systems. Nevertheless, it's possible for a test system to score less than 1,200 or more than 5,500 points by under- or over-performing with respect to those reference systems.

Next, you'll see diagrams from both systems reviewed here. Our discussion of and conclusions drawn from these results follow in the section that succeeds these diagrams.

In these results, the hardware configuration comes more clearly into play than in our last round of tests, where battery life also factored into overall results. Here, the HP trumps the Qosmio across the board, except on the Graphics Benchmark, where the Qosmio edges ahead by a margin of just over 6% (in all other cases, this works the other way by a margin of around 20%). We're pretty sure this is an artifact of the test itself, because of the way the HP outperforms the Qosmio when playing back HD-DVD material, and probably reflects cache and memory utilization requirements that fall within the Qosmio's capabilities. Otherwise, with the same graphics chipset, we can only look to the displays as a potential source for this difference.

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