How we test

With this budget gaming PC group test, we’ve started testing with Futuremark’s PCMark 8 v2.0 benchmarking suite. Unlike the previous PCMark 7 benchmark, the new version doesn’t produce a single overall figure. Instead, results are divided into Home, Creative, Work and Storage tests.

The Home benchmark reflects command tasks for typical home use with lower computing requirements such as web browsing, photo editing and low-end gaming.

The Creative benchmark is aimed more at enthusiasts and professionals working with multimedia and entertainment content. It is more demanding on the processor and includes transcoding tests, as well as further gaming workloads.

The Work test is geared towards office work tasks like creating documents, web browsing, spreadsheets and video conferencing. This test does not stress the gaming and multimedia capabilities of the PCs in this group test.

Gaming performance

We’ve used three games to evaluate graphics performance. We run our tests at 1280x720- and 1920x1080 pixels at various detail settings. Framerates are recorded using the following games and quality settings.

Final Fantasy XIV: 1280x720, Medium quality; 1920x1080, Maximum quality.

Alien vs Predator: 1280x720, all settings at Maximum quality; 1920x1080, all settings at Maximum quality.

Sniper Elite V2: 1280x720, all options set to Low quality, advanced shadows off, Supersampling off; 1920x1080, All options set to Medium quality, advanced shadows off, Supersampling off; 1920x080, all options set to Ultra quality, Advanced shadows – high, 4x Supersampling.

Power consumption torture testing

We measure the power consumption of each PC base unit when idle, and again while running at its performance limit. During the idle test, the PCs hard drives are still spinning and the power-management features are not enabled. For the full-load torture test, we run Prime 95 to force all CPU processing threads to maximum utilisation and stress system memory. At the same time we run the Geeks3D FurMark