"Even since the dawn of time mankind have been chasing more power and performance. I’m pretty sure that right after pre-historic man figured out how to make spear-heads out of flint, someone started to look for a way to make it bigger and more pointed. And when the wheel was invented and put on a cart, the next day someone started to add spoilers to the cart and pimp it to look cooler and go faster. Most of us know that Charles Babbage designed “the Analytical Engine” in 1837. What most do not know is that he then started to plan the water cooling and overclocking of his design the day after. Let’s face it, regardless how fast our computers are, how many cores our CPU have and whatever monster video card we buy, we are never satisfied and want more speed.

This is where the need for good benchmarking software comes in. Futuremark is a company that is almost synonymous with benchmarking. While they are known primarily for their video card benchmarks, 3DMark, they also have a wide variety of other benchmark programs like PCMark, MobileMark and SysMark.

Today Futuremark is releasing their latest PCMark benchmark, PCMark Vantage. This article will go through the various tests as well as add some scores that we’ve got from running the test on a couple of different systems."