Written By : Lee Mansfield
June 2005

The Tests section gives an overview of the tests you have selected to run, with the tests split between the different suites:

" System
" CPU
" Memory
" Graphics
" HDD
" Custom

By default the System Test Suite follows this order:

As you can see, there are two tests which have two processes running, and the final test has a whopping 4 processes running simultaneously. Although I unfortunately don't have the means to test it, I imagine these multi threaded tests would benefit greatly from dual core processors.

By clicking on the 'Select…' button you can edit which Test Suites to run, or if you were in the process of tweaking every ounce of performance out of your memory, for example, and weren't interested in the processor and graphical tests you can customise your own test suite to run only the tests you specify. As you can see from the image below, it's very easy to create customised suites and it even gives you the ability to create multithreaded tests. This particular suite has two test with 4 threads, and two single threaded tests:

You can also see that customised suites give you the ability of running each test once, twice, or if you're stress testing your machine you can even run tests in infinite loops.

Below you can see all of the tests available from each test suite:

If compare those to the tests available within PCMark04:

You can see that PCMark05 has refined all of the suites, apart from the Memory Test Suite which remains identical, and has even added a few new tests in.

The System section gives a brief overview of your system configuration, and clicking on the 'Details…' button loads up comprehensive details of everything going on in your PC.

Below is a very small example of what it shows:

It's split into several sections:

• CPU Info
• DirectX Info (including display and sound devices)
• Memory Info
• Motherboard Info
• Monitor Info
• Operating System Info (including open applications and running processes)
• Storage Devices

I won't go in to details of every single piece of info it provides you with because I don't want to type out 10 pages of boring information, and you don't want to read it. But it includes such things as the 'Max User Clipping Panes' for your graphics card and whether your Storage Devices have 'Acoustic Management' support, as well as including more useful information such as processor speeds and cache sizes, system memory installed, and graphic card details.