• PC World
• »Software

A year and a half in the making, PC WorldBench 4 is the fourth generation of PC World's industry-standard benchmarking application. Designed to measure the performance of today's remarkably powerful personal computers, PC WorldBench has been in continuous use at PC World for six years and is regarded in the computer industry as one of the leading measures of PC performance.

Like its predecessors, PC WorldBench 4 uses real applications running real-world tasks to assess a PC's overall processing speed. PC WorldBench 4 debuted with our December 2001 issue.

Note that PC WorldBench 4 scores cannot be directly compared to scores from older versions of PC WorldBench.

A Multi-OS Benchmark

PC WorldBench 4 runs on PCs loaded with Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 Professional, and both versions of Windows XP. Eleven separate applications, listed below, make up the PC WorldBench 4 suite. We selected this group for such reasons as their mass-market appeal, stability, market share, and variety.

PC World has always held that application-based benchmarking is a better way to quantify computer performance than esoteric synthetic methods. PC WorldBench 4 runs--albeit in an extremely compressed way--many of the same tasks that average users perform on their PCs every day. Another important reason we use these applications is that it's nearly impossible for PC vendors to fine-tune or optimize a system to get a better PC WorldBench 4 score.

Here are the applications used in the benchmark:

• Adobe Photoshop 5.0
  
  
• Corel Photo-Paint 8
  
  
• Intuit Quicken Deluxe 99
  
  
• Lotus 1-2-3 r9
  
  
• Lotus Word Pro 9
  
  
• Microsoft Access 2000
  
  
• Microsoft Excel 2000
  
  
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2000
  
  
• Microsoft Word 2000
  
  
• Netscape Communicator 4.73
  
  
• Visio 5.0 Standard Edition
  
  

The PC WorldBench Score: How It Works

PC WorldBench 4 installs, runs, times, and then completely removes each application automatically, one at a time. This process helps ensure that we run the same software configurations and versions on every computer we test.

Like previous versions of the benchmark, PC WorldBench 4 combines the results of scripted application tests and then compares them to the scores of a reference system--currently, a Gateway Select 1200 PC configured with a 1200-MHz AMD Athlon processor, 128MB of RAM, a 20GB Quantum Fireball hard drive, and a VisionTek GeForce3 AGP graphics card.

To make the comparisons easy to interpret, we set the Gateway's final score at 100. Another system with a score of 150 is 50 percent faster than the Gateway; a system earning a mark of 200 is 100 percent faster, and so on.

We selected the Gateway's configuration specifically to place it at the lower end of performance scale through the year 2002. We try to use different PC vendors' systems over time. In future revisions of the benchmark, we will continue to upgrade the applications and the reference PC.

Letters we receive suggest that some readers are confused by the word scores associated with PC WorldBench 4 scores in our Top 15 charts. For example, a reader may ask how a Windows 98 SE system can get a lower PC WorldBench 4 number but a higher word score than a comparable PC running Windows 2000 Pro.

Like most benchmarks, PC WorldBench 4 runs significantly faster on systems with Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP than on systems with Windows 9x and Me. You, however, are unlikely to notice this difference when using your PC.

As a result, in our Top 15 Office PCs, Top 15 Notebooks, and Top 15 Home PCs charts, our word scores only directly compare the numerical scores from PC WorldBench 4 earned by systems equipped with the same operating system--Windows 98 SE versus Windows 98 SE or Windows XP versus Windows XP, for example.

Can I Get PC WorldBench 4?

This is another frequently asked question about our benchmark. The short answer, unfortunately, is no. We provide copies of PC WorldBench 4 to system vendors so they can see how it works, but we do not offer it to the public.

The applications we use in our tests are incomplete versions, and their respective vendors license them to us in limited quantities. Moreover, like any application, PC WorldBench 4 would require costly technical support if we offered it to all takers. We believe that we better serve our readers by putting those resources into additional stories and product testing.

Tracey Capen, Executive Editor, Reviews and Testing