Features:

Modern usage model: SYSmark 2004 is organized as scenarios, which are designed to reflect snapshots of "a day in the life" of an Internet Content Creator and Office Productivity Applications user.
Popular applications: SYSmark 2004 includes a robust set of 17 applications covering a wide range of Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity application categories. The SYSmark 2004 workload emulates usage patterns of today’s desktop business user that includes concurrent execution of multiple applications.
Updated application versions: Applications have been updated to include Adobe® Photoshop® 7.01, Adobe® Premiere® 6.5, Macromedia® Dreamweaver® MX, Macromedia® Flash MX, Microsoft® Windows Media® Encoder 9 Series, Network Associates® McAfee® VirusScan® 7.0, ScanSoft® Dragon Naturally Speaking® 6 Preferred and WinZip Computing WinZip® 8.1.
New Applications: SYSmark 2004 includes new applications that reflect emerging business user trends: Adobe® After Effects® 5.5, Adobe® Acrobat® 5.0.5, Discreet® 3ds max™ 5.1, and Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.
Internet Features: SYSmark 2004 tests performance of a PC executing a wide range of popular operations using leading Internet Content Creation applications.
Response time: Response time of applications to user interaction is used in the performance metric rather than end-to-end run time. Users care most about the response time of the application to user input.
Concurrency Performance: BAPCo has extended its state-of-the-art benchmarking technologies by devising methods (first introduced with WebMark 2001 and SYSmark 2001) for accurate and realistic measurement of concurrent tasks. SYSmark 2004 uses scenarios where background applications that detect viruses, compress files, encode video and render video run concurrently with other business applications.
Realistic execution speed: The benchmark runs at realistic execution speed, with think times between application interactions, in order to emulate a desktop user’s interaction with the operating system and applications. The think time emulates a desktop user’s interaction with the operating system and applications. Operating system behavior is more realistic when application interaction has think times (just like a real user) as the OS can devote itself to other housekeeping activities (like memory management, scheduling etc).
Reliable and Repeatable Results: SYSmark 2004 implements standardized testing through an automated, point-and-click Benchmark Manager with reporting guidelines to ensure reliable, repeatable results.
Multiple OS Support: SYSmark 2004 supports Windows XP (Professional and Home), and Windows 2000 (with Service Pack 4).
Non-US English OS Support: Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.
Compare Results: SYSmark 2004 includes the ability to collect and store performance data for user-specified projects; ability to compare user results with a wide range of vendor and testing lab results available publicly on BAPCo’s web site at www.bapco.com.
Automated generation of BAPCo’s Full Disclosure Report (FDR) for ensuring consistent reporting of results.
Comprehensive System Performance Testing: Benchmark workload content carefully developed to reflect accurate and realistic usage patterns covering a wide range of functionality within each application.
Extensive validation across multiple hardware and software configurations to ensure consistent and reliable performance measurement results.