
We expected to see some of the most variance within the PCMark suite here, as gaming storage throughput might be the most sensitive to impacts from background file scanning. Not so. Only GFI and Microsoft show any real influence on scores, and even then the improvement is minimal. Once more, we see AV not hindering system performance.

Perhaps this is our most damning data point. Top to bottom, we see a roughly 12% impact against DirectX 9 performance across the board. No AV product does better than another at preventing this. It seems to be an inherent liability baked into the background scanning process.

Still image manipulation performance? Zero impact from AV presence. Nothing to see here...move along.

Importing photos is another place where we expected to separate the wheat from the chaff, as this would keep AV scanning constantly busy watching incoming files for malicious bad apples in our barrels of photo files. Yet again, there’s not much variability. GFI and Microsoft tie for delivering the best storage performance. And strangely, our clean configuration shows the worst performance of the bunch, lagging the leaders by about 10 percent. So AV is good for storage and bad for graphics? Weird.

Finally, some data that matches our presuppositions. The clean configuration shows the highest Web page browsing speed, which makes sense as the results are totally unscanned. GFI seems to spend the most cycles on page element analysis, bringing up the back of our fairly tight-knit pack. Microsoft comes the closest to native speed, although, given AV-C’s detection results, we have to wonder if this is because Security Essentials isn’t doing as thorough of a job.

The data decryption side of Web browsing tends to lean more heavily on CPU performance, so we would expect to see AV apps with higher CPU utilization resulting in lower scores here. It’s possible that such an effect is seen here, but with the groups laggard (Symantec) turning in a score only 3% below native speed, we’d call this a non-issue. The preliminary conclusion would be that AV is not affecting CPU performance.

Finally, we have Windows Defender performance. Defender guards against spyware. It’s a free download and a fairly necessary one if you’re only going to run a basic, free AV app. This time, Kaspersky falls behind while all other AV products show a fair performance gain over our clean baseline, led by AVG and GFI.
- 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.