Questions about our charts? The following information should answer them.
How do the charts work? Each month we test a large number of products, such as PCs, printers, monitors, graphics boards, CD-RW drives, scanners, and digital cameras, and we compare them with previously reviewed products. Only the highest scoring products earn positions on the charts, which are refreshed monthly. As new versions of products are released, we remove older ones from the chart. System configurations are shown as tested. Vendors may have since changed components, and the results you see on our charts may not necessarily reflect the performance you obtain from a different configuration.
What does the overall rating mean? This 100-point scale reflects results from a combination of our hands-on evaluations and lab performance tests, plus an assessment of price and support policies. The percentage that each category contributes to the overall rating is listed at the bottom of the chart. A score in the 90s is exceptional, while one in the 70s is above average. Overall ratings can change month to month as prices change or as newer products earn higher performance scores than older models.
What does the WorldBench 5 score mean? It's a measure of how fast a PC can run a mix of common business applications as compared with our baseline machine, a high-end PC with a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 FX-51 processor and 1GB of RAM, as well as an NVidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics card with 256MB of RAM. For example, a PC that scores 150 is 50 percent faster than the baseline system. See our WorldBench 5 page for more information.
Where do the scores for reliability, support quality, and support policies come from? Reliability and support quality scores for PCs are based on surveys of PC World readers compiled for our annual feature on reliability and service (see our most recent article). The policies score is based on the support policies that the vendor offers, including the length of warranties and the hours of technical support provided.
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