Will a faster CPU significantly increase virus scan speed?

AntaresX · Jun 17, 2013

I've been experimenting with the time it takes virus scans to run on various computers in my house. There seems to be little difference with significantly more or less powerful systems. Just to understand how they work, what pieces of hardware would give me faster virus scan speeds? The CPU is the first thing that came to mind.

kyzarvs · Jun 17, 2013

RAM (partially) , Disc technology (mainly) and settings (MS Security Essentials for example is set to only utilise a % of available resources as default) - an SSD would really show a difference.

stingstang · Jun 17, 2013

It goes:
1. Hard drive
2. Cpu
3. Ram
4. fsb/north bridge

rgd1101 · Jun 17, 2013

lostgamer_03 · Jun 17, 2013

The place you keep your applications and such on will have the biggest impact so the HDD/SDD, as the read speed of a HDD/SSD will ultimately decide how fast you can get through all your applications. A CPU will increase the speed, no doubt, but as long as the CPU isn't very old or very cheap, then the CPU should be no problem whatsoever.

dextermat · Jun 17, 2013

Hi,

Please read this page before posting on the forum,
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/19-73-forum-rules-read-first

For your question: It depends on what kind of upgrade. Let's say you upgrade from a pentium 4 1.66ghz to a 3.0 ghz, You will see a difference, but it also depends on the rest of the of the computer, memory and hard drive.

Since most of the virus scan is on the hard drive, the speed of the had drive will have an impact.

If you would of detailed your computer, and what upgrade you will make, we could of told you if it would d of been a a good upgrade or not.

AntaresX · Jun 17, 2013

kyzarvs :

I see, so it's possible to set virus scans to utilize anything they possibly can, and at that point things would most likely be bottlenecked by the HDD.

lostgamer_03 :

So the reason all these computers of varying power are taking about the same time to run virus scans is because they all likely have HDDs of the same speed?

Dark Lord of Tech · Jun 17, 2013

Install an SSD and watch a virus scan.

BuddiLuva · Jun 17, 2013

Definitely SSD/HDD being the biggest factor in a virus scan.

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Will a faster CPU significantly increase virus scan speed?

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