Futuremark’s PCMark 7 is a well-known benchmark tool that runs the system through ordinary tasks, including word processing and multimedia playback and editing. Graphics and processor power figure prominently in this benchmark, but graphics power doesn’t play as big a role here as it does in another Futuremark benchmark, 3DMark (which is designed for testing the system’s gaming capabilities). This test also weights heavily on the storage subsystem of a given device.
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| Futuremark PCMark 7 |
| Simulated Application Performance |
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As we saw in the Cinebench benchmark, Dell's XPS 15 Touch bullied its way to the front of the line, even edging out some gaming laptops like CyberPowerPC's Fangbook. This further illustrates the lack of performance bottlenecks on any of the XPS 15 Touch's subsystems, and also underscores the high speed nature of the 512GB mSATA SSD, as this test heavily favors systems with flash based storage solutions.
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| Futuremark PCMark 8 |
| Simulated Application Performance |
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Futuremark recently launched PCMark 8, which has several built-in benchmark tests. The Home test measures a system's ability to handle basic tasks such as web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat. The Creative test offers similar types of tasks, but has more demanding requirements than the Home benchmark and is meant for mid-range and higher-end PCs. The Work test measures the performance of typical office PC systems that lack media capabilities. Finally, the Storage benchmark tests the performance of SSDs, HDDs and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games.
What we like about PCMark 8 is that it's a more balanced benchmark that separates different types of workloads. This way the overall scores aren't overly affected by any one piece of hardware.
Ranked by storage, the XPS 15 Touch comes out on top once gain, this time by a hair. It also posted a strong score in the Home Accelerated portion, which measures performance based on common home computing tasks (web browsing, writing, photo editing, video chat, and casual gaming), though surprisingly fell close to the bottom in the Work benchmark, which measures a system's ability to handle basic office work tasks.
