PCMark Vantage review 

While Futuremark's best-known product remains their 3DMark benchmarking suite, for some time now the company have also given plenty of their time to creating an entire system benchmark in the form of PCMark.  Unlike many other system benchmarks, which rely heavily on pure synthetics, PCMark has always attempted to mimic real-world usage workloads, representing common tasks like web browsing and the like.

It's now been around two years since the release of the last iteration of this benchmark, PCMark05, and thus the application has begun to look rather long in the tooth considering that since that time we've witnessed the release of a major new Operating System from Microsoft, coupled with further advances and changes in the way people use their PCs.  So, with 2007 racing towards its close, it's time for something new in the PCMark stable, which is exactly why we're here today.

With Windows Vista the talk of the town these days (in both positive and negative ways), it is perhaps of little surprise that this new iteration of PCMark is a Windows Vista-only benchmark, aiming to be a hugely comprehensive testing suite for this new Operating System while leaving Windows XP system testing in the capable hands of PCMark05.  With this new focus, the PCMark branded also needed a catchy title in keeping with its Vista-centric status.  Naturally, this name had to begin with a 'V', and with 'PCMark Val Doonican' proving unpopular and 'PCMark Viagra' seeing all of FutureMark's e-mails flagged as spam, the final choice of title for this new benchmark is... PCMark Vantage.  Catchy, huh?

Of course, there's very little in a name, what you really want to know is what PCMark Vantage does for you and me, right?  That's exactly why we're here today, as we examine the full capabilities of the Professional Edition of this system benchmarking suite...