SYSmark 2012

Yes. Some applications packaged with the benchmark suite, such as Microsoft® Office® 2010, will expire 30 days after installation. Once the applications have expired, the HDD containing the SYSmark® 2012 installation must be reimaged with a new copy of the operating system, and a new instance of SYSmark® 2012 must be installed.

No. SYSmark® 2012 must be installed on and run from the C:\ drive and the user account installing the benchmark must have administrator rights on the target system. In addition, SYSmark® 2012 tests must be executed from the same account that was used to install the benchmark

Test systems with SYSmark® 2012 installed should not be connected to the Internet. Some applications installed as part of SYSmark® 2012 may be deactivated and cause the benchmark to fail if an Internet connection is detected. These applications include:

• Adobe® Acrobat® Pro
• Adobe® Photoshop® CS5 Extended
• Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS5
• Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS5
• Adobe® After Effects® CS5

Yes. SYSmark® 2012 can be installed from external media such as USB HDD or memory keys. Follow the steps below to install from external media. At least 20GB of free space is required.

• Create a new folder
• Copy the contents of DVD 1 into the newly created folder
• Copy the contents of DVD 2 into the same folder as the contents from DVD 1
• The folder should now contain the following: Apps, Apps2, Data, Data2, Setup, Setup2, Autorun.inf, BAPCo.ico, and SYSmark2012_Setup.exe
• Install the benchmark by launching SYSmark2012_Setup.exe from the GUI, or on the command line

An error folder included with the results of a SYSmark® 2012 run indicates that one or more of the scenarios in that project encountered a problem. In such cases, SYSmark® 2012 will attempt to retry the scenario a default maximum of 5 times. The retry maximum is can be customized on the command line using -r or –retries. Setting the value to “0” will disable the retry feature and SYSmark® will halt if an error is encountered.

The Windows operating system attempts to boost performance by caching and pre-fetching data whenever it can. Scores may be lower on the first iteration as SYSmark® is running while Windows caching and pre-fetching is in progress.

The Conditioning Run provides the opportunity for the system to take advantage of built in OS performance optimizations that may help improve scores. If selected, the Conditioning Run iteration will be executed at the beginning of a project. Results from the Conditioning Run are not included in the project scoring.

The SYSmark® 2012 installer will fail to install ABBYY® FineReader Pro if the account name used to install the benchmark contains an apostrophe. To resolve this issue, create a new administrator account which does not contain apostrophes in the account name.

At this time, SYSmark® 2012 supports installation on US English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Brazilian Portugese and Spanish operating systems. Additional language support may be added in future releases. Check the SYSmark® 2012 FAQ online for the latest information.

Installation time for SYSmark® 2012 takes approximately 1.5 hours. Installation time may vary based on the target system configuration.

How long does it take to complete one full iteration of sysmark® 2012?

Running one full iteration of sysmark® 2012 takes approximately 3.5 hours on the reference system. The time to complete a full iteration may vary depending on the the configuration of the system being tested.

Be sure that the system under test is set to the correct date and time to avoid the ‘Clock error detected’ message.

Applications within BAPCo benchmarks are not compiled by BAPCo, but by the original application vendors. All other components within BAPCo benchmarks are compiled using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, or Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 (with default options).

This issue typically manifests itself on certain machines with special drive hidden partitions installed by OEMs on their branded machines. One can work around this issue by deleting the special hidden partition installed on the drive(s) and re-running SYSmark 2012.

SYSmark® 2012 supports in place upgrades to the latest shipping version by using the patch installer executable, which can be downloaded from www.bapco.com/support. After downloading the patch, copy it to the system with existing SYSmark® 2012 installation, and double click the patch executable to launch it. Follow the prompts to install. SYSmark® 2012 patch installers will update any previous version of the benchmark to the latest shipping version.

SYSmark® 2012 patch installer does not support updates of existing partial installations of SYSmark® 2012. Attempting to apply the patch installer to a partial installation of an earlier version of SYSmark® 2012 will result in corrupting the installation on the system. If this happens, please start with a clean image and complete install of SYSmark® 2012, then apply the patch to update to the latest shipping version.

SYSmark® 2012 versions prior to version 1.0.1.84 do not support version detection which prevents an older version from being installed over a newer version. If an earlier version of SYSmark® 2012 is installed over a newer version, the installation will become corrupt and unusable.

SYSmark® 2012 full installer cannot be used to update an existing older version to the latest shipping version. The installer will exit if an older version is detected on the target system.

• Activate the Windows 8 installation using a retail license key.
• Activate the Windows 8 installation using a Key Management Server. Note, this option is only available for Windows 8 Enterprise edition
• Enable Windows 8 Test Mode
  • Launch the “regedit” application
  • Navigate to the key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control.”
  • Create a new key with name “7503491f-4a39-4f84-b231-8aca3e203b94”

SYSmark® 2012 should be run with the DPI scaling set to 100%. Setting the DPI scaling value to something other than 100% may cause SYSmark® 2012 to report ‘screen resolution mismatch’ error and halt the test.

SYSmark® 2012 3D Modeling scenario may fail to run on systems with greater than 16 cores/threads due to a limitation in the 3D Studio Max 2011 application. This issue has been fixed in SYSmark 2012 Patch 2 v1.5.2.295. Please update to the latest version.