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PCMark Vantage Test Results
PCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7. PCMark Vantage is well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows Vista/7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use a few select tests from the suite to demonstrate/simulate real-world processor usage in this article. Our tests were conducted on 64-bit Windows 7, with results displayed in the chart below.
TV and Movies Suite
- TV and Movies 1 (CPU=50%, RAM=2%, GPU=45%, SSD=3%)
- Two simultaneous threads
- Video transcoding: HD DVD to media server archive
- Video playback: HD DVD w/ additional lower bitrate HD content from HDD, as downloaded from net
- TV and Movies 2 (CPU=50%, RAM=2%, GPU=45%, SSD=3%)
- Two simultaneous threads
- Video transcoding: HD DVD to media server archive
- Video playback, HD MPEG-2: 19.39 Mbps terrestrial HDTV playback
- TV and Movies 3 (SSD=100%)
- TV and Movies 4 (CPU=50%, RAM=2%, GPU=45%, SSD=3%)
- Video transcoding: media server archive to portable device
- Video playback, HD MPEG-2: 48 Mbps Blu-ray playback
Gaming Suite*
- Gaming 1 (CPU=30%, GPU=70%)
- Gaming 2 (SSD=100%)
- Gaming 3 (CPU=75%, RAM=5%, SSD=20%)
- Two simultaneous threads
- CPU game test
- Data decompression: level loading
- Gaming 4 (CPU=42%, RAM=1%, GPU=24%, SSD=33%)
- Three simultaneous threads
- GPU game test
- CPU game test
- HDD: game HDD
Music Suite
- Music 1 (CPU=50%, RAM=3%, GPU=13%, SSD=34%)
- Three simultaneous threads
- Web page rendering - w/ music shop content
- Audio transcoding: WAV -> WMA lossless
- HDD: Adding music to Windows Media Player
- Music 2 (CPU=100%)
- Audio transcoding: WAV -> WMA lossless
- Music 3 (CPU=100%)
- Audio transcoding: MP3 -> WMA
- Music 4 (CPU=50%, SSD=50%)
- Two simultaneous threads
- Audio transcoding: WMA -> WMA
- HDD: Adding music to Windows Media Player
* EDITOR'S NOTE: Hopefully our readers will carefully consider how relevant PCMark Vantage is as a "real-world" benchmark, since many of the tests rely on unrelated hardware components. For example, per the FutureMark PCMark Vantage White Paper document, Gaming test #2 weighs the storage device for 100% of the test score. In fact, according to PCMark Vantage the video card only impacts 23% of the total gaming score, but the CPU represents 37% of the final score. As our tests in this article (and many others) has already proven, gaming performance has a lot more to do with the GPU than the CPU, and especially more than the hard drive or SSD (which is worth 38% of the final gaming performance score).
The results show that the Core i3 HTPC definitively out performs the ION 330 platform. Considering this is a TV and Movies test, and considering the Atom handles this type of applications in a decent way, the test doesn't show 100% trustable results. The difference of bandwidth between the Core i3 330M and the desktop version show another 30% increase. The gaming suite shows very different results from what I'd expect when gaming. For example, the Intel GMA HD in all the test systems performs better than the ION 330. While this is not exactly true, the result is based on different results which depend on CPU and SSD also. In this case, the CPU is doing that big difference, but being realistic, games normally use GPU much more than CPU, and so, if we benchmarked a game, we would see a much smaller difference between the ION 330 and a Core i3 based system.
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