PassMark Software November 2012 Consumer Security Products Performance Benchmarks

Both suites and stand-alone AVs.

http://www.passmark.com/ftp/antivirus_12-performance-testing-ed2.pdf

 

Avast seems good

 

Norton prevails.

 

Seems like a test geared towards making you notice Norton, why would you otherwise label Norton with bright company yellow throughout the "test" and all other vendors boring grey?

 

It's because it was commissioned by Symantec, just like their last performance test (posted earlier on the forum) was commissioned by ESET. Up to reader if he or she thinks that influences the results, I guess. Don't see why it should; the number of registry keys a program creates upon installation can't really be different depending on who has paid for the test, for example.

 

Which is of course one of the most important metrics one should be looking at when choosing an AV product, right?

 

I agree 100%, that's why i personally won't even look at the that "test".

It might be a presented neutral test, but IME you get what you pay for and Norton certainly got something here and it's called exposure. Passmarks also got something out of this.......me looking the other way because i personally do not trust "tests" any participant commissioned, particularly when it is presented in this way which can hardly be called neutral.

IMHO, it's not a test. It's a clever marketing ploy by Norton and they are very good at it.

 

Just relax and enjoy the test guys

 

would have liked eset included

 

I'm thinking that bright yellow Norton bar is helping you stay awake while going down page after page after page after page. 57 pages of unbiased data while you look for your credit card thinking of buying some big Norton boxes for Black Friday.

I paid $7.50 for Norton antivirus this past summer and zilch for Avira Internet Security 2012 for 18 months. Both performed well on this test.

 

How can you judge without "even looking at that test"??The test and test lab may behave completely neutrally for all you or I know and this test may have been commissioned by Norton to gauge how their product performed against the competition in such a neutrally run test:-if they had run the test themselves and then released the results they would definitely be accused of bias/cheating etc!Maybe if Norton hadn't faired so well the results may not have been released but that is supposition as well!
Some of the test I feel are pretty meaningless,who for example really bothers about installation size on most PCs with size of hard drives used today?

 

I second that!

 

Should I say +1

 

Arguably Norton is in yellow bars because it got the highest overall score. It serves as a means of relative comparison in the separate tests showing how a product compared in a category with the overall leader.

 

Results for ESET can be found in the previous report.

http://www.passmark.com/ftp/ESet_vs_9_Competitors_InternetSecuritySuites-Sept2011.pdf

 

what is the Trend Micro Virus buster standing for?

 

yeah me to +1

 

Now second (except for Norton 360 Version 6.0).

2012 Consumer Security Products Performance Benchmarks (Edition 3)

 

What counts for me is

1. Network throughput
2. File/Copy Time
3. Boot time & initial lauch disk I/O (after daily/startup update)

The fact that it has or has not some sort of intelligent executable caching (skip existing programs which are unchanged since last check)

Nice thing is one can make his/her own rating based on these tests

 

I'm a little surprised that PC Tools does relatively well on this test considering that it's near the bottom on nearly all other performance tests. Hopefully, Symantec's sponsorship has nothing to do with this

BTW, test is done from Japan? "Virus Buster" is Trend Micro's name in Japan

 

2nd report is somewhat what I had personally expected.
What is this Trend Micro Virus Buster?

how can it be different from IS as it uses same things and just different name for japan.

 

It is the same product but AFAIK there are a few slight differences. We'll have to ask a Japanese user to know what those differences are.

 

so you are saying that trend micro does not have an in house engine it only uses VB? right?

 

Trend Micro's "Virus Buster" has nothing to do with the Hungarian VirusBuster. It is the same engine and same definitions as Trend Micro's "Titanium" lineup. Historically, however, I remember some functions were changed slightly for better compatibility with more local applications. In any case the protection level was always roughly the same.

 

Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender came first in quite a few of those, most importantly (to me), boot time, browsing time and installation size. Whilst coming close to top for network throughput and a low amount of registry keys. It's a shame it was the slowest of all to do a scan, but luckily I never do that. Pretty good results from a free AV.

Hopefully they work on the scanning time for v4 final, then I can execute a file I've downloaded 1 second faster.

Also, who needs good detection rates when you have good performance! Though really, it's only a "backup layer" for me since it's built into Windows 8, otherwise I wouldn't bother with AV. I don't have any real trust in AV.