PCMark 8 is the sister program to the Futuremark main product, 3DMark 11. The difference here is the fact that PCMark is more of a whole system benchmark solution, rather than being focused on gaming, DX11 and graphics, like the 3DMark tests are.
PCMark has been around since 2002 and has evolved and matured into an industry leader in benchmark testing. Futuremark has spent considerable time fine-tuning PCMark so that it's more relevant to a real-world benchmark. By this we mean it uses real-world tasks and applications to create scored scenarios that will reflect the average PC when used at home or in an office.
There's a focus in version 8, which has been around for well over a year now, on web browsing, SSD performance and OpenCL GPU Computing. The tests themselves are split into six main themes: Home, Creative, Work, Storage, Applications and Battery Life Testing. When combined, these will produce a score based on all aspects of the system in question.
As with 3DMark 11, PCMark 8 has several versions available. The Basic Edition is free and allows you to test your PC with the Home, Creative and Work set of benchmarks. The Advanced Edition costs around £32 and includes all five of the main performance tests and the battery life test should you be running it on a laptop. You'll also be able to single out SSD and HDD tests in the Storage section, run individual workload tests to help fine tune your system, and you'll receive in-depth hardware graphs and charts detailing any potential bottlenecks your system may have.
Finally, the PCMark 8 Professional Edition will set you back a cool £966 or thereabouts after monetary conversion, and it features all of the above plus expanded storage tests, command line automation and scripting, offline results, export results as XML or PDF, and you can target Adobe and Microsoft applications for further testing and monitoring.
The Professional Edition is for companies using a site licence and can be used to test the performance impact of certain operating systems or programs prior to them being installed across the company. The home user, though, gets a reasonably good benchmark suite, which for the most part is a good indication of how a particular PC will operate under 'normal' duties.
The fact that PCMark is more general use rather than having a gaming bent makes it a little more appealing to those who are after a good general use PC and IT teams. Trying to persuade your employer's finance director to part with a chunk of the company's capital based on a 3D gaming benchmark obviously won't get you very far. The same goes for the home user; if the PCMark 8 score was displayed next to a PC for sale on the shelves, then the user may take more notice, especially if it was more universally accepted.
PCMark 8's strength lies in the fact that the results are easy to analyse and compare. For that alone PCMark 8 is well worth considering, but the hefty 2.9GB download is somewhat extreme, just for a potential one-off installation and execution.