PCMark04 and 2005 are application-based benchmarks and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark04 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results. As far as possible, PCMark04 uses public domain applications whose source code can be freely examined by any user.

Both PCMark04 and PCMark05 include 4 categorized suites for benchmarking your computer. These include CPU, Graphics, Memory and a Hard Disk Drive benchmark. In our case, we selected only the CPU test suite.

The P4 530 earned the most PCMarks while the Celeron D 346 is close behind. The D 341 is is in third place and the AMD comes in last. As you may notice in the following table, the P4 530 is better in almost all tests apart from the Grammar Check and Audio Conversion where the AMD had more throughput. Other than this, the Celeron processors reported better performance than the AMD Athlon 64 3000+ in the remaining tests. In most cases, the Celeron processors were not that far behind the P4 processor, and in the case of File Decryption were actually better.

The test results, analytically:

As in the case of PCMark04, the P4 is the most powerful with the Celerons close behind.