Battery-Life And Applications Tests Coming To PCMark 10 In Near Future

The folks over at UL have announced that a new iteration of PCMark 10 is coming, and will introduce two long-awaited tests: battery-life, and applications. On the battery-life side, this means that PCMark 10 will finally be able to fully replace PCMark 8 for those who were sticking to it for that testing. It’d also be a good reason people should move up from the old Powermark, which was never officially supported in Windows 10.

It’s oddly difficult to find quality battery-life testers for notebooks, so I’m personally very pleased to see one making its way into PCMark 10, and I’m confident that I’ll be giving that a test once it lands – on an ARM notebook, no less. In the email we were sent: “You will also be able to benchmark the latest Snapdragon-powered Always Connected PCs running Windows 10 on ARM, with results that are comparable with scores from traditional x86-based devices.” How neat is that?

The other test added relates to applications, so it will require Microsoft Office to be installed. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Edge will all be thoroughly tested, to help give an impression of how great a PC is in normal real “work” loads.

Admittedly, the one test we’ve been eagerly waiting for an introduction to PCMark 10 is storage. The mobile version of PCMark has supported storage tests for a while, but desktop? It’s been oddly missing, but UL told us that as soon as the applications and battery-life tests are out the door, the storage test will regain focus. Until then, we’ll continue to use PCMark’s last version in our storage testing toolkit.