Futuremark the leading provider of computer performance analysis software and services, today unveiled PCMark?04, the latest version in the popular PCMark benchmark series. PCMark04 is a state-of-the-art benchmarking tool designed to be easy to use and widely accessible. PCMark04 builds on Futuremark?s strong benchmark development experience and provides a sophisticated tool for measuring PC performance for home usage. PCMark04 supports the complete benchmark cycle ? allowing you to benchmark your PC, view the resulting benchmark details, compare your results to those of others, and finally analyze how to improve your PC performance. It produces highly reliable and detailed benchmarking results with a simple, intuitive user interface. An integrated Online ResultBrowser allows instant results comparison against more than 10 million benchmark results in Futuremark?s ever increasing performance database. PCMark04 features both system and component level benchmarking. System level benchmarking produces a measure of the PC?s overall performance. It is a single number that is easily comparable to that of other PCs. However, advanced users and professional testers may want to further explore the performance of individual components such as the CPU, the memory, the graphics subsystem, and the hard disk. Component level benchmarking helps them to isolate the performance of individual components, exposing their strengths and weaknesses. PCMark04 even includes the ability to create custom benchmarks by putting together tests tailored to specific needs. Being an application-based benchmark, PCMark04 incorporates algorithms and application fragments that are most often used by the typical PC user. This allows PCMark04 to be a smaller installation, as well as being easier and faster to run. As far as possible, PCMark04 uses public domain applications whose source code can be freely examined by any user. ?PCs continue to improve at a dizzying pace. As each PC component ? CPU, system memory, graphics card, hard disk, etc. ? increases in speed or capacity, it becomes increasingly difficult for the home user to evaluate benefits of these changes. Software applications that may or may not take advantage of the latest hardware add further to the confusion?, said Tero Sarkkinen, Executive Vice President Sales and Marketing for Futuremark. ?The goal of PCMark04 is to solve this problem by providing an easy-to-use tool that outputs easy-to-understand and reliable performance figures.? Key User Benefits of PCMark04: Easy to Use: Easy to use for both novice users, benchmarking professionals, industry vendors and press labs; Complete Benchmarking Cycle: Benchmark a PC, view the resulting benchmark details, compare the results to those of others, and finally analyze how to improve that PC?s performance; System and Component Performance: Expose both overall system performance as well as isolate performance of individual PC components; Integrated Online Result Browser: Instantly compare results to the world?s largest database of performance data with global validation. PCMark04 Test Suites: System Test Suite: Extensive collection of application-based tests that emulate typical home usage; tasks include image, audio, and video processing, 3D game play, web page rendering, virus scanning, file compression and encryption, grammar checking, and graphics memory usage; CPU Test Suite: Includes tests that isolate the performance of the CPU; tasks include image, audio, and video processing, virus scanning, file compression and encryption, and grammar checking; Memory Performance Testing: Tests measure the performance of the memory subsystem; these tasks involve writing, copying and random access to data blocks in the L1 cache, L2 cache, and main memory; Graphics Test Suite: Tests measure both 2D and 3D graphics performance of the PC; 2D tasks are moving windows, windows transparency, graphics memory usage, and video playback; 3D tasks exercise fill rate and polygon throughput capabilities for the graphics subsystem; Hard Disk Drive Test Suite: Using disk activity traces from real-life usage, these tests isolate the performance of the hard disk drive; disk activity measured includes Windows® XP startup, application loading, file copying, and general disk usage. Pricing and Availability PCMark04 is available in two versions: PCMark04 Pro for private use and PCMark04 Business for commercial and business use. The software are available from http://www.futuremark.com/products/pcmark04/ for $19.95 for private use and $199.95 for business use. A limited functionality version of PCMark04 is freely available at http://www.futuremark.com/download/ for evaluation purposes.