For all the advances the PC industry continues to make, buying the right PC is still just too hard.

Mainstream consumers are confronted with many choices and decisions, and not enough straightforward performance tools to guide those decisions. But what would that better guide look like? It would focus its attention on what you care about most, and tell you how well a PC did those things, in plain English. It would tell you about quality of experience, because media playback isn’t really about “faster is better.” But more than anything, this guide should help you make an informed decision about the right PC for what you want to do.

Today, we announce the launch of Intel® HDxPRT 2009, comprehensive platform evaluation tool for measuring digital media experience. Intel® HDxPRT evaluates the capabilities of a media PC using real world usage scenarios and popular media applications. Intel® HDxPRT results tell you three things: The overall score helps you understand a platform’s overall media capabilities. A five-star rating scale expresses how well it plays back HD video. And you get a clear picture of how long it takes to complete media-focused tasks.

Let’s get to know Intel® HDxPRT, and how it can help choose your next PC, or help you evaluate the one you have today.

Intel® HDxPRT builds on the previous Intel® Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool (DHCAT) program, a ground-breaking platform evaluation technology for media experience. In creating HDxPRT, we went back to the drawing board and completely redesigned the tool to include the usage categories such as HD video playback, HD Video editing, Photo processing, and media conversion for portable devices, which are relevant today. We retained the innovative user perception modeling technology from DHCAT, but reworked the results communication completely to make them easier to understand.

For those interested in running Intel® HDxPRT themselves, we also put a lot of effort into improving the usability, and now it’s easier than ever to setup and run. And, HDxPRT now only takes about 20 minutes on today’s mainstream laptop and desktop systems.

In designing HDxPRT, we put a lot of emphasis on finding a natural way to evaluate user experience in the usages HDxPRT measures. The first step in determining a natural way to evaluate experience was to identify the natural units of work. The natural work units for media usages are typically based on the event captured in the media, the device used, or the output of the creation process. Some examples are – “Videos from my Camcorder”, “Photos from last vacation”, “Photos from the memory card in my digital camera”, “Photos for my Facebook* album”, “Music from my CD collection”, and “Music for my iPod*”. We used this approach in HDxPRT to define the usages in our workloads. In addition to the usage description, we used commonly understood device specs to describe our workloads even more objectively. Example – “Vacation memories from 10 Mega-pixel Digital Camera with 4GB memory”. Once we identified the natural work units, it was clear to use that time was natural metric for the create usages in HDxPRT. For measuring HD Playback experience, we continue to use the quality of experience rating system we created for Intel® DHCAT.

Intel® HDxPRT measures the digital media creation performance and HD Playback capabilities of a PC. Tests take only about 20 minutes to run, and HDxPRT reports out several scores.

The Create HD Score measured by HDxPRT represents the overall digital media creation performance of a test system. The Play HD Experience rating represents the Blu-ray and HD Flash videos playback capabilities of the test system. The Create HD score in HDxPRT 2009 is based on the test PC’s performance in video, photo and audio usages. Our design approach of using natural work units resulted in defining the video, photo and music usages as described below. Create HD score is a higher-is-better score, whereas the sub-scores are lower-is-better (time-based) scores.

Edit Videos from your Camcorder: Time taken to edit 90 minutes of footage from a HD camera to create videos for publishing on YouTube, archiving on Blu-ray discs and Flash videos for sharing on your website.

Create Memories from your digital camera: Time taken to edit and process vacation photos and video clips from a 10 Mega-pixel Digital Camera with 4GB memory.

Fill up your iPod: Time taken to prepare 4GB of music and videos for a portable media player for enjoying on-the-go.

HDxPRT 2009 workloads are based on usages performed with popular programs, like: i. DivX* encoder to create videos for YouTube*, ii. MainConcept* H.264 encoder to create videos for Blu-ray discs, iii. Sorenson Squeeze* 5 for Flash videos, iv. Adobe* Photoshop* Elements* 7 for Photo editing v. Apple* iTunes* to convert music for portable media players vi. Cyberlink* PowerDVD* 8 and Windows Media Player* to play H.264 videos vii. On2* Flix*8 Player and Windows Media Player to play Flash* videos.

These programs are required to run HDxPRT 2009, so we include trial versions of most of these required applications in the HDxPRT setup. However, Adobe Photoshop Elements* is not bundled in the HDxPRT setup and needs to be installed separately. HDxPRT 2009 will work with the trial version of Adobe Photoshop Elements that you can download here: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=photoshop_elements. However, the trial version may expire after the trial period (typically 30 days), which will cause HDxPRT to stop working. Please refer the Intel® HDxPRT 2009 user manual for more information and step-by-step instructions to install Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Intel® HDxPRT 2009 is very simple to setup and run. Intel® HDxPRT setup automatically installs the workloads and media files along with the trial versions of all needed applications, except Adobe Photoshop Elements. The documentation included with the HDxPRT installer provides detailed instructions on how to setup Adobe Photoshop Elements. Once installed, Intel® HDxPRT test is completely automated and easy to run. Starting a test is as easy as launching HDxPRT by clicking on the HDxPRT icon on the Desktop and clicking on “Test Capabilities” in the main interface (shown below).

At the end of a test, the results for the test are automatically displayed. You can also view the results of previous tests done on the test system and do a side-by-side comparison of multiple results.

With Intel® HDxPRT 2009, we’ve built on the unique quality of experience measurement technology pioneered by Intel® DHCAT, and made the tool even easier to run. We combined that technology with the kinds of tasks real people do using popular applications, and present results that are easy to understand and help you choose the right PC for you. If you want to test your own PC, Intel® HDxPRT 2009 is now easier than ever to run. Just download HDxPRT 2009 using the link below, and install it. You’ll need to download and install Adobe* Photoshop* Elements as well, and that link is below as well. Then, you’re ready to put your system to the test.

As always, we want to know what you think about Intel® HDxPRT, so get your copy, take it for a spin, and let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you in the forums.

Click here to download your FREE copy of Intel® HDxPRT 2009

Click here to download a trial version of Adobe* Photoshop* Elements

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.