Overview

Futuremark is releasing three versions of PCMark 10:

• PCMark 10 Basic Edition
• PCMark 10 Advanced Edition
• PCMark 10 Professional Edition

PCMark 10 Basic Edition is free to use, but PCMark 10 Advanced Edition will cost $29.99, and both will be released on June 22, 2017. Both differ in the benchmark suite tests that can be run, and here too are three separate benchmarks developed as part of PCMark 10:

• PCMark 10 Express Benchmark
• PCMark 10 Benchmark
• PCMark 10 Extended Benchmark

Yes, you are not the only one who is seeing a lot of common terminology here. A benchmark being named exactly the same as the benchmark suite is potentially confusing, and to minimize the issue, I will address the three tests separately and individually.


PCMark Basic Edition includes the PCMark 10 benchmark only, whereas PCMark 10 Advanced Edition includes all three benchmarks - hence the free vs. paid differential here. There are a few other features the Advanced Edition offers over the Basic Edition - offline result storage and hardware monitoring graphs - but both offer unlimited testing using the included benchmarks and the online storage of results.


PCMark 10 Professional Edition is intended for commercial use and also comes with all three benchmarks; you do have to contact Futuremark for pricing, which indicates that it is going to be significantly more expensive, but you do get an earlier availability date (today!), the private result storage option with no online storage if need be, and priority technical support. A summary of the differences between the three editions is shown above.

Readers here will thus be interested to see if the free version will suffice or if the Advanced Edition offers enough to justify the cost. So let us begin with a look at each of the three benchmarks in more detail now.