PCMark: How it actually works

PCMark first released in 2002, making it one of the oldest benchmark applications that still receives regular updates. It's very popular among more casual users because its main benchmarks are free, provide an easy-to-understand score, and test areas that are actually meaningful to users. Although PCMark is often thought of as a simple benchmark that's not really for hardcore enthusiasts, under that casual-looking veneer is one of the most complex benchmarking applications out there.

What is PCMark?

PCMark, currently in its 10th version, is an application developed by UL Solutions that allows users to run a wide variety of tests. PCMark 10 tries to provide a complete perspective on the performance of your PC in the most popular and common workloads. Because PCMark's tests are fairly casual in nature and score the entire computer rather than individual components (except in the storage benchmarks), running the benchmark with one of the fastest CPUs or most powerful GPUs won't necessarily have a particularly large impact on the resulting score.

Enthusiasts typically don't use PCMark. Benchmarks like Geekbench and CrystalDiskMark are much more popular because they push individual components to their limit and reveal their absolute maximum speeds. That's not to say Geekbench, CrystalDiskMark, and other tests are superior, however. Many of these benchmarks test synthetic and perhaps unrealistic workloads whereas PCMark attempts to simulate real-world usage, which obviously skews heavily to casual applications. Each approach has its upsides and downsides.

PCMark 10 offers four main categories of benchmarks: performance, battery life, applications, and storage. Here's a quick breakdown of each.

Performance

The benchmarks here run a series of tests and provide a score to rate a PC's overall performance. There are three different performance benchmarks to choose from: the standard PCMark 10 benchmark, the express benchmark, and the extended benchmark. The difference between these benchmarks comes down to what types of software are tested in each, and PCMark 10 tests four different kinds: essentials, productivity, digital content creation, and gaming.

Except for gaming, each category includes multiple individual applications. PCMark assigns a score to each and uses those scores to create an overall score. The essentials category tests app start-up, web browsing, and video conferencing (like Zoom); productivity benchmarks performance in LibreOffice Writer and Calc (basically Microsoft Word and Excel); digital content creation involves photo and video editing, plus rendering in programs like Blender; and gaming only runs the Firestrike benchmark from 3DMark, which is also developed by UL Solutions.

Then there are the three benchmarks that test different combinations of those four underlying categories. The standard benchmark basically tests everything but gaming, which is what you'd run for a non-gaming PC. The express benchmark cuts out digital content creation and is largely for casual users who want to spend as little time as possible benchmarking. The extended benchmark is more for enthusiasts who want a totally complete picture of performance that includes gaming.

Battery life

There are five benchmarks under the battery life category: modern office, applications, video, gaming, and idle. Those first two test a wide variety of software, but the others just test one piece of software each (or in the case of idle, nothing in particular at all). It's up to you to determine which benchmarks you want to run, and I recommend at least running either the modern office or applications benchmark plus the idle benchmark, which just tells you how much battery life your device has when it's just sitting around, you know, idle.

One of the most important features of PCMark's battery life benchmarks is that they run until the device's battery reaches zero, meaning the end result of the benchmark isn't just an estimate. The downside of doing it this way is that the initial charge of the laptop can impact the results, and PCMark will not allow you to run any battery life benchmark if the device's battery life is less than 80%. You should run these tests with a full battery for accurate results.

Applications

The applications benchmark is the simplest one in PCMark 10. It's a test suite of four Microsoft applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Edge. You must have Microsoft Office installed and registered before running the applications benchmark. There are no other benchmarks under the applications category, making it the simplest of all four.

There's actually quite a bit of overlap with the performance benchmarks, which have writing, spreadsheet, and web browser tests. However, the fundamental difference is that the performance benchmarks use non-Microsoft software, such as LibreOffice Calc instead of Excel and Firefox instead of Edge. This category basically only exists if you specifically want a score from Microsoft's applications.

Storage

Finally, there's the storage category, which offers four different benchmarks with unique characteristics: full system, quick system, data, and performance consistency. The full system benchmark scores overall performance in common workloads; the quick system benchmark is a short test that runs lighter benchmarks and is mostly useful if the full system benchmark fails to run; the data benchmark is geared towards testing the performance of drives intending for merely storing data; and the performance consistency benchmark is a multi-hour long test that measures how consistent performance is.

One important thing to note about these benchmarks is that they can have an impact on the health of your storage devices, especially if you run them multiple times. The quick system and data benchmarks only write 23GB and 15GB, respectively, but the full system benchmark will write over 200GB and the performance consistency benchmark will write at least 23TB. I'd recommend staying away from the performance consistency test and just running any of the other three benchmarks if you want to test your storage.

Putting it all together

That's everything there is to PCMark 10, and now let's take a look at a result from the standard PCMark 10 performance benchmark, which tests the essentials, productivity, and digital content creation applications. This one is from our Ryzen 7 7800X3D review. For the sake of brevity, I'm not going to show each individual score from each test, but just the overall score for each category and the benchmark as a whole.

You can tell almost immediately that the overall score isn't merely an average of the results from each category. PCMark 10 calculates the overall score using the geometric mean of the scores of each individual test, and then takes the category scores and finds their geometric mean. PCMark 10 presumably uses the geometric mean to negate the impact of outlier results, which could significantly skew a benchmark that tests so many different categories.

Because PCMark 10 does all the analysis for us, there's not much here to pick apart. This makes comparing PCMark 10 results very easy to understand, but it also obfuscates what PCMark 10 is actually testing and whether the score even matters or not. The lack of raw data is a key reason why enthusiasts tend not to pay much attention to PCMark 10, but it is undeniably a very thorough benchmark and tests (mostly) real software everyone uses, and that's worth something.

How to download PCMark 10

PCMark 10 comes in two editions: Basic and Advanced. The Basic Edition is free and only comes with the standard PCMark 10 performance benchmark, while the Advanced Edition costs $30 and comes with everything else. You can get the Basic Edition from Steam and buy the Advanced Edition directly from UL Solutions or on Steam.