Do Antivirus Suites Impact Your PC's Performance?

[theconsolegamer]

Hey, I always thought Panda was the most crappy AV and that AVG was pretty cool.

 

[Guest]

I think your "Clean System" had a virus.

 

[getacarlos]

We use Sohos at work and it's the worst antivirus I've come accross. Our workstations (each one up to $10,000) currently run into hiccups, almost every five minutes or less. We asked IT to turn off the antivirus for one day as a test, and the systems were flying.
At home I have a comparable system, although it has slightly inferior specs and cuz I built it myself, cost me about $4,500. I run MS Security Essentials on it, because it's free. And my system feels amazing.
Can't say for sure that MS Security Essentials is a great program, but I can say for sure that Sophos is horrible.

 

[tmathis]

Interesting that efficiency is not relevant on modern computers.
But I work at a school and we have a ton of ancient computers.
I wonder how these programs perform on older computers.

 

[eddieroolz]

Good article that puts a good question to test, but I would've preferred to have had it go in even more depth by testing with several games.

 

[beenthere]

The answer to the article title question is:

Hell Yeah!

 

[snadge]

obvious something isnt right with the test setup if AV's are making the boot process quicker... and when does windows take 160 seconds too boot? even from a 5400rpm drive..? ive never had a windows installation take that long too boot, right now im using a 5 year old cheap acer laptop with 120Gb drive and windows 7 installed and it boots in 25-30 seconds... Avira AV

 

[augiem]

Professional reviews are great, but they're always too focused on running benchmarks or talking about feature comparisons. User reviews give a far better impression of some things including durability/longevity and compatibility (in the case of hardware) and pointing out quirks with daily use.

Any Kaspersky user out there. Try opening windows explorer and digging around in many folders in quick succession. Notice the 0.25 - 0.5 second delay each and every time you dig into a folder? I bought KS 2010 last year for my Core i7 hoping the software would be improved after several years of using other stuff. Sadly after a week I uninstalled it. I dig through HUNDREDS of folders a day most of the time doing my work and I can't stand being speed bumped by my AV software just for navigating around my hard drive. So yeah, Kaspersky may not bog down the benchmarks, but it does bog down daily use in ways reviewers never seem to catch.

This year I've had Kaspersky, McAfee, Nod32, Avira, GData, Microsoft, and Norton on my machine (jumping from trial to trial to see what's new this year). I'm currently using Norton Security Suite because it comes free with my ISP. No issues with slowdown during every day tasks, but it sure comes with a big bag of other shortcomings and annoyances. I may try out Trend Micro soon seeing that's its getting good results this year.

 

[Chewie]

When I first got on the net, back in '99 I think, I was using an HP desktop (my first and last pre-assembled desktop) which came with McAfee. My wife lost about 80GB of photos to a virus. Since then I'd settled on AVG free, Lavasoft Ad-aware, and Spybot S&D to stop or find the nasties, and ccleaner to clean up after them. Then last year I was playing a FPS when the game got shut down to ask if I wanted to install an update from Ad-aware. Game over for Ad-aware.
And then over the last six months my web browsing started getting really slow. I've got a 2MB/s ADSL2 connection, and I can play MW2 online just fine, but my browsing was down to dial-up speeds. I uninstalled AVG and the speed came right back up. So, where to go for AV? I tried MSE which didn't seem to slow anything down, but it kept telling I might be unprotected and I needed to do a scan, usually just after a scan had finished.
So I tried the Vipre trial about 2 months ago. So far it seems fine, and I did actually get the family licence, which is a first for me. Its early days yet, of course, but so far it has kept nicely in the background and not bugged me.

 

[Guest]

About: "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."

Earth to writer: Free AV apps have included spyware/adware protection for years. Check the Security Center and you'll see that they all report in under Spyware protection. Also how long did it take you to download Defender for Windows 7?

Such basic misinformation calls the rest of this study into question, for me anyway.

 

[Guest]

To get meaningful results, the testing should have been done on the lowest performance modern platform that's readily available - a netbook with 1GB of RAM. It's incredible that they thought of using a slow HDD and completely overlooked the need to minimize availability of the other two major resources that AV programs chew up, particularly RAM. Sure that would have taken a lot more clock time/patience with the testing, but the results would have been much more useful.

 

[Guest]

Please whats the point of running AV speed tests on a Core i7 2600K? at least use a mobile Core i5 dual core or maybe even an old Core 2 Duo. My point is majority of PCs today do not carry a Core i7 2600K. Yet the same majority will experience a significan performance gain/loss depending on the AV suite they use. I experience a huge difference in boot time with my dell workstations (core 2 duo/quad, xeon, opteron) with AVG, Norton and MSE (MSE being the fastest). Hence this article is a useless comparison.

 

[pxl9190]

4 years ago on an overclocked Core2Quad (2.66GHz OCed to 3.2GHz) with 4GB of DDR2-800 and 512MB 8800GT, I could play Crysis (1650x1050 medium) in the foreground with Mcafee running a full scan in the background with only 10-20% deficit in frame rate compared to a not running AV. AV did occupy a good deal of one of 4 cores.

Maybe Tom's can try benchmarking Crysis 2 or BF3 with AV full scan running in the background. That's the kind of info many gamers here would want to know.

And that might be the only way AV can have an impact on i7-2600K system performance that the end user can feel.

 

[custodian-1]

[citation][nom]dogman_1234[/nom]Regardless what anyone says: Using McAfee is like using a Glad garbage bag as a condom.[/citation]

+1

 

[Guest]

pctools is the most resource clogger on an average computer,tested on an gatewaym460 pentium m470,gateway l3010us 1.2ghz athlon L110,hp dv6 1253 c2d 2.26,hp pavilion desktop core duo 2ghz,generic desktop athlon II x3 3.2ghz.what a waste of money ,time and resources i haven't seen souch a POS since the mcaffe and norton days.

 

[Guest]

Sorry but this test doesn't make much sense.
Sure take a Core i7 2600k, add an SSD and antivirus performance impact is negligible.
Ok in this test you used a mechanical HDD instead.
But on my Core i7 machine i only look at features, for an antivirus.

Now take a netbook or nettop or htpc based on Atom or Fusion instead.. THAT is where antivirus performance can be significant.

Please make a test on such weak cpus, to see the true impact of the different antivirus suites on performance.

 

[jn77]

You could also claim that in any given computer, you need to dedicate 1 full core to run strictly your anti virus application

 

[gametstr]

I think articles like these should reflect the more common masses and use the test setup which is more low end so that the actual Taxing of the CPU can be seen clearly.

 

[dangolo]

As a systems engineer, this article hurts my brain.
WHY wouldn't you take a look at the negative impact on disk IO and latency??
WHY would you ignore the 3 best performers from the first page?
Why would you even include Symantec, it's antivirus in name only, and everyone here knows it's usually WORSE than having an actual virus.

If anything, we're seeing which AV platforms are actually good, so thank you TH for doing that much.

 

[silverblue]

I honestly thought Windows Defender had been discontinued and MSE was its spiritual successor (along with antiviral capabilities, of course).

[citation][nom]pxl9190[/nom]Maybe Tom's can try benchmarking Crysis 2 or BF3 with AV full scan running in the background. That's the kind of info many gamers here would want to know.[/citation]

They did - there's a two-part article on Toms. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find them...

[EDIT]Didn't find what I was looking for, however here's a decent article for the less privileged of us:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu,2439-10.html

[/EDIT]

 

[Guest]

Security is the chief topic to be concerned with, since it physically holds most of our private information. I've had different (and terrible) issues with my PC for a gazillion of times. One thing I've learned to conduct first, was to research the market properly and only then make informed decisions. I've been recently following vistasecurity2011.com blog, and let me tell you - it either strengthen your skepticism further, or actually land an effective solution security-wise for your desktop!

Good luck!

 

[nikorr]

WoW, GDATA rulez with dual scanning engine!

 

[nikorr]

[citation][nom]Chewie[/nom]When I first got on the net, back in '99 I think, I was using an HP desktop (my first and last pre-assembled desktop) which came with McAfee. My wife lost about 80GB of photos to a virus. Since then I'd settled on AVG free, Lavasoft Ad-aware, and Spybot S&D to stop or find the nasties, and ccleaner to clean up after them. Then last year I was playing a FPS when the game got shut down to ask if I wanted to install an update from Ad-aware. Game over for Ad-aware. And then over the last six months my web browsing started getting really slow. I've got a 2MB/s ADSL2 connection, and I can play MW2 online just fine, but my browsing was down to dial-up speeds. I uninstalled AVG and the speed came right back up. So, where to go for AV? I tried MSE which didn't seem to slow anything down, but it kept telling I might be unprotected and I needed to do a scan, usually just after a scan had finished.So I tried the Vipre trial about 2 months ago. So far it seems fine, and I did actually get the family licence, which is a first for me. Its early days yet, of course, but so far it has kept nicely in the background and not bugged me.[/citation]

U see slow down only on slow machine or laptop.

 

[HC1Gunner]

Would like to also seen how AV suites affect gaming if they are left enabled.

 

[unreal104]

What do you expect people??... Microsoft Security Essentials is a BEST after all... its free and light on resources and do detect every malware (for me). Never had any malware issue since i used.