Intel® DHCAT 3.0: What’s New

Intel® DHCAT 3.0 is much easier to use, and its results are much easier to understand. We’re also adding some key new features like an online results browser (ORB) with some advanced functionality that lets you evaluate your system without even installing Intel® DHCAT. We also are adding HD video quality tests you can run to examine a Media PC’s video playback with your own eyes.

Simplified Results: One issue we’ve wrestled with from the beginning has been finding the right level of detail in presenting Intel® DHCAT results. There’s a LOT of data, and we want to convey a complete picture. However, in previous versions, we’ve opted to provide more detail as opposed to less at the top level. This produced results screens like this one:

This is the Platform Capabilities Matrix (PCM) from DHCAT 2.02, the current version. As you can see, lots of information, but without a legend, it’s hard to know what these icons represent, or to some degree, even what you’re looking at. With a legend to explain the icons, some people in our market research study liked this screen, but most thought it was overwhelming.

What we realized was that while this level of detail is useful, it shouldn’t be the top level of detail. With that in mind, we showed other, more distilled results screens to the consumers we talked to in our study. The most popular one was very similar to the top-level results screen that you’ll see in DHCAT 3.0:

What’s great about this approach is that after scanning this screen for 5-10 seconds, you’ve got a good snapshot of this PC’s media capabilities. If you want to drill down, you can click on any one of these elements and get more information about that particular capability.