Spotlight: Extreme Computing

PC World Unveils WorldBench 5

More than two years in the making, WorldBench 5 is the fifth generation of PC World's industry-standard benchmarking application. Designed to measure the performance of personal computers, WorldBench 5 debuts with this issue. WorldBench 5 is also the first of our benchmarks to be available for public purchase.

Our evolving benchmark has been in continuous use at PC World for nine years and is regarded in the computer industry as one of the leading measures of PC performance. Like its predecessors, WorldBench 5 uses real applications running real-world tasks to assess a computer's overall performance. This latest edition adds much more varied testing, including multitasking and task-switching tests, more-strenuous 3D graphics routines, and audio and video encoding that we designed to stress today's more powerful systems.

We use WorldBench 5 to test desktop, notebook, and tablet PCs, as well as to support our testing of hard drives, graphics boards, and other products. An important note: Because WorldBench 5 uses a completely new set of applications, and because we have updated our baseline system, the scores in this and future issues cannot be compared in any way with scores from older versions of WorldBench.

An Up-to-Date Benchmark

WorldBench 5 runs on computers using the Home, Professional, Media Center, or Tablet PC version of Windows XP. Fifteen applications (counting the components of Office XP) make up the WorldBench 5 suite. We selected this group, listed in the box below, for their mass-market appeal, stability, market share, and variety.

PC World has always believed that using an application-based benchmark is a better way to quantify computer performance than using esoteric synthetic methods. WorldBench 5 runs--albeit in an extremely compressed fashion--many of the same tasks that average computer users perform on their systems every day.

The WorldBench 5 Score

WorldBench 5 is automated and bulletproof: Once you launch WorldBench 5, it runs on its own from start to finish and reports the results, in text or graphics form, as individual test scores and as the overall WorldBench 5 score. It can recover from and repeat failed tests, and can finish the testing and prepare its report even when individual applications will not run or complete. You can easily remove WorldBench 5 when it is finished; this feature helps ensure that we run the same software configurations and versions on every computer we test, and that WorldBench 5 will leave your PC unaltered.

Like previous versions, WorldBench 5 combines the results of scripted application tests and then compares them with the scores of a reference system--now a high-end PC with a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 FX-51 CPU and 1GB of RAM, as well as an NVidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics card with 256MB of RAM.

To make the comparisons easy to interpret, we set the baseline system's final score at 100. A system that receives a score of 50 is half as fast as the baseline; a computer that earns a final mark of 200 is twice as fast; and so on.

Over the years, we've used different PC vendors' systems. For WorldBench 5 we selected our baseline because its configuration specifically places it near the upper end of the current performance scale. Visit our WorldBench 5 page for more information about WorldBench 5 or to order a copy.

Dan Sommer