Futuremark Announces PCMark 7

It’s been a little while since we’ve last seen a PCMark update, so it might have been assumed that Futuremark got caught up with its other products and had forgotten about it. Not so, as proven today with an announcement of PCMark 7, a full suite dedicated to testing the overall performance of your PC.

Like previous PCMarks, PCMark 7’s overall suite condenses the results from six separate suites into a single score. But as usual, those suites can also be run individually in case you are looking to single a certain type of testing out. This is ideal especially for storage reviewers, as it allows them to run just that one specific test rather than the entire suite.

While PCMark Vantage had seven or eight suites, PCMark 7 brings six to the table. “Lightweight” is just as it sounds, and is designed to test the capabilities of netbooks and similar devices. “Entertainment” tests performance in entertainment-related content, such as with gaming and movie-viewing. “Creativity” focuses on image manipulation and video creation, and “Computation” focuses on the computational performance of the CPU, and possibly also the GPU (the fact sheet doesn’t mention a GPU).

Lastly, the “Storage” suite will likely be used by storage reviewers all over to test out the latest solutions, especially fast SSDs. PCMark Vantage was an overall favorite of companies like Seagate and Western Digital, so it can be assumed that barring any unusual problem, most people will adopt PCMark 7 as soon as possible.

Futuremark hasn’t given us a release date, but the official PCMark.com website states “Coming Soon”. That could mean a month or three months or six months… so I guess we’ll just need to be patient.

Designed for Windows 7, PCMark 7 includes more than 20 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. These workloads are combined into a range of convenient suites each giving a different view of your system’s performance.