Benchmark Results: 3DMark And PCMark
Because our real-world benchmarks are based on proprietary applications that many folks don't have, we provide 3DMark and PCMark results primarily as a service to readers who would like to compare our data to their own machines.
Scoring nearly twice as high as Don Woligroski's $1,000 PC, results like these in real-world testing would give my $2,000 machine a fighting chance in the value race (which is just as much about pricing as it is about going fast). On the other hand, Paul’s $500 machine scores far closer to the $1,000 build than its low price would indicate.
PCMark places an inordinate emphasis on storage performance. This is the only metric where Don is able to cheat, so to speak, since his SSD is too small to hold our test suite.
Our secondary use of PCMark is as a measure of synthesized real-world drive performance. Its storage tests represent the data access patterns of several real-world uses, and we chose the three most pertinent results as the basis for the disk performance portion of our overall performance score. As a competitor in this competition, I’ll repeat my objection to Don’s drive being too small to fit our entire test suite (in the real world, you wouldn't be able to get all of these apps installed on a 60 GB drive). But, since drive performance is only 10% of overall scoring, I'm still going to let his system slide in those calculations.
