Here we come to the meat of our testing. When you have real applications running and you’re manipulating real media content, how much of a burden is your AV software? There are two ways to look at the answer, and we’ll show both. Here are the overall PCMark7 score results with the horizontal axis set to Auto:

This view magnifies differences in the results. The obvious conclusion is that Kaspersky seized the day and Microsoft...didn’t. Now let’s start the horizontal axis to 0 and see how things look:

It’s an even field, right? Suddenly, you no longer care about performance—they’re all practically the same—and you’re back to thinking about pricing and features. In fact, the real take-away here might be that there seems to be little to no impact from AV products on application performance. Kaspersky and McAfee even slip in just under our clean config score, again defying intuition and making the case for normal statistical variance in this test load.
So much for our lesson in statistics manipulation. You know that PCMark is comprised of several tests examining different usage scenarios, so let’s break this down.

A few AV products claim to improve rich media content performance, but if this test, which focuses on video playback frame rates, is any indication, such enhancements are totally absent from our test group. We found no statistically significant variance.

With video downscaling, we see a big of wiggle. In an odd twist, every competitor except Microsoft narrowly outperforms our clean configuration. AVG squeaks in with the win, but it’s practically a photo finish for all players. Again, we see little influence from antivirus background scanning in either direction.
- Antivirus Need...and Greed
- Contenders: AVG And GFI
- Contenders: Kaspersky And McAfee
- Contenders: Microsoft And Symantec
- How We Tested: Configuration
- How We Tested: Benchmarking
- Application Installation
- Boot Time
- Standby Time
- PCMark 7 Results
- PCMark 7 Results, Continued
- Web Page Load Time
- Scanning Time
- Do Antivirus Suites Have A Big Impact On Performance?
i think something is wrong with your numbers.
Also, the timing of this article was excellent. I had just been doing some research about what anti-virus software I should switch to, mainly based on performance, but I guess I just got all the information I needed.
I stopped using AV products on my personal systems back in 2003. Norton back then was god-awful on a Pentium 4 systems, seemingly crushing the life out of a system. Even with a first generation WD Raptor 36GB my P4 2.6 would choke not only with Norton, but also McAfee. I might not use AV software, but I do put it on my family members' systems when it doesn't kill performance. In that respect these modern solutions seem much better.
>>Apparently, this is somewhat like saying you can boil water at 230 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 260 degrees. As long as the water is at 212 degrees or higher, no one really cares.
i think something is wrong with your numbers.
I had kaspersky on my intel i7-920 system with a SSD app/boot drive, and kaspersky brought my system to it's knees compared to a clean system without any antivirus. It was like a computer from 7 years ago in it's response time. Try to install something? Took 10 seconds to start the pre-scan, then it would pre-scan and then install was slower. Run firefox from a fresh boot? Wait 3 seconds. 3 seconds? With a SSD?
I removed it and tried out norton internet security and everything is instant like my clean system. I don't even notice that I have it most of the time. I attribute that partially to my good system, but I attribute the other part to it not just adding arbitrary wait times onto everything I try to do. Use that processor! I have multiple more to spare!
I know people think dirty of Norton, but as long as it protects me while pretty much being invisible to my performance to the naked eye, I'll give the once slow kid in the class if he's a genius now. I don't know why, but it works.
Tom's something is wrong with your test bench.
If anyone is interested, I did ran my own tests for most of the latest security suites and have reached to the conclusion that Avast 6 is the fastest around. A scan on 10 GB of data on an SSD took ~2 minutes , compared to 8 minutes it that took Kaspersky to finish the same job.
I agree that Avira free should have also been included to balance the field a little bit.