AV and IS Benchmark Testing

I was just checking a Symantec blog where they commissioned Passmark to do benchmarking tests on Norton's '08 AV and IS solutions plus other competitors as well (Eset was not involved for some reason). These tests were performed on "low-end" XP computers with 256MB RAM.

The resulting report is here for those interested (report is in PDF format).

EDIT: The reason for NOD32's (and others) absence:

 

Funny test. Not really important, but it is funny

 

i found it really interesting, cheers midway.

the ram usage got my attention,

even the highest ram-user for AV was only 71.5mb, not really too terrible.

Norton AV 2008 = 10mb ram, impressive.
Bitdefender AV 11 = 2.9mb ram, even more so.

figures really, as Bitdefenders suite is definatly the lighest and fastest regarding pc performance than any other that ive tried.

sooo under-rated.

 

I assume that the RAM figures aren't those appearing on Task Manager. If this is the case, the benchmark is useless.

 

I'm afraid the numbers are those appearing on Task Manager. Therefore yes, they are useless.

 

how do you know this?

they certainly dont match my task manager numbers.

eg.

my f-secure shows between 35-43mb, they say its 82mb.

 

The numbers may depend on the particular system. Even on one system - if you wait a few minutes or run some other programs, you may get completely different numbers (at least for some AVs) than before. So you can't expect you get the same numbers as on your system.
(Besides, they have little to do with real memory consumption, but I'd repeat myself on that.)

 

Which proves the numbers are not that useful.

Systems and the programs that are run in them are different. Hence the variation. It doesn't help anyone when they are told its 82 mb and then its radically different.

 

You mistook.

 

I was going by this in the blog:

 

what really catch my eye is that Avast! got best rating in boot time and scan time ...

anyway interesting report to info mix