14 DAY TRIAL // Futuremark confirmed yesterday the already announced PCMark 7 will soon be available to the general public. The release date has been pinned to May 3, 2011 and the application is set to be launched in three editions: Basic (free), Advanced and Professional.
PCMark 7 is designed to continue on the same line as its more than five years old predecessor, PCMark05, and sport a suite of system benchmarking tests. In the case of the soon to be released version the tests combine more than 25 individual workloads that assess storage, computation, image and video manipulation, gaming and web browsing.
As expected, the Basic edition, being free of charge, is the most limited as far as benchmarking is concerned, as it will encompass only the PCMark test.
However, PCMark evaluation is actually an important one since it measures overall system performance during typical desktop usage and also returns an official score for your machine.
The test suite designed to evaluate storage devices takes into consideration hardware innovations of the past years and, as such, is prepared for external hard drives or solid state drives (SSDs).
The suite of tests available in the application includes Entertainment (measures system performance in entertainment scenarios), Creativity (focused on viewing, editing, transcoding and storing videos and photos), Computation (isolates computation performance), Storage (targets hard disk(s)) and Productivity (web page loading, use of home office apps).
You can currently pre-order the paid versions of the application on the developer’s website. These are priced $39.95 for the Advanced edition and $995 for the Professional one.
The difference between the two mainly consists in usage license, as the more expensive version can be used commercially, but it also features command line automation and priority when requesting support.
It is recommended that you run the application on a station running Windows 7 Home Premium or higher, with 1GB of RAM for x86 architecture and 2GB for x64, having DirectX 11 compatible graphics adaptor (for computation test) and 1280x1024 display resolution. Also, make sure that you have 10GB of free space available.
In the meantime, you can download the previous version of PCMark from this link.