11. PCMark05 Benchmarks

Like SYSmark 2004 SE, FutureMark's PCMark05 is all about performance. As with SYSmark 2004 SE, the computer is plugged into an AC socket and its CPU is set to run at top speed.

PCMark05 includes test suites that focus on the CPU, memory, graphics and hard disk drives of a computer. An overall System Benchmark score is computed from these four tests. If any part of a test suite cannot run or fails, a PCMark05 overall score is not computed for that suite and the overall score is not computed. This happens most often with the graphics tests when a graphics controller is unable to perform specific parts of a test. Computers with very low PCMark05 graphics scores (200-600 right now) are not included in the PCMark05 chart for graphics performance.

When the PCMark05 tests were created, scores were scaled to run between 1200 and 5500. Low and high end reference systems were used to scale and compute the low (1200) and high (5500) scores. However, scores less than 1200 are possible with less powerful systems than the low end reference system and, as hardware performance has improved, scores exceeding 5500 have been measured. We will increase the top score on our PCMark05 performance charts when our test results go above 5500.

To run the PCMark05 benchmark tests Microsoft Media Player 10 and Microsoft Media Encoder 9 must be installed on the test computer. The same system and Windows settings as for SYSmark 2004 SE are used when we run PCMark05. You can find a reference to further information about these settings in the section "Preparing for and Running SYSmark 2004 SE."

Here are the charts showing PCMark05 scores for the Winbook X610 and the HP Pavilion DV4000, except for the graphics score. Where appropriate we include averaged results for all or some of the laptops with 1.2 GHz CPUs and 512 MB of memory. Conclusions follow these charts.