WorldBench 6 Released, Works on All Windows 7 Editions

The latest version of WorldBench, the PC World-developed benchmark for testing PC system performance, is now available for purchase.

WorldBench 6 is a new real-world benchmark designed to test PCs running the Windows 7 operating system. (For more information, visit www.worldbench.com.) Though WorldBench 6 resembles previous versions in appearance and navigation, we've put much behind-the-scenes work into making sure that it runs reliably on all editions--both 32-bit and 64-bit--of Windows 7, as well as on Windows Vista and XP.

Continuing the tradition of the previous versions of our test suite, WorldBench 6 uses application-based tests to gauge real-world system performance. We have updated its applications and tests to provide a better assessment of today's more-powerful systems, which have larger amounts of RAM and multicore CPUs.

The applications in WorldBench 6 are:

• Adobe Photoshop CS2
• Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP-3
• Firefox 2
• Microsoft Office 2003 with SP-1
• Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0
• Nero 7 Ultra Edition
• Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5
• WinZip Computing WinZip 10.0

WorldBench 6 is fully automated. Application tests are scripted to run consecutively, and the benchmark automatically combines their results and compares them with those of a baseline system to give the final WorldBench score. The benchmark can recover from and repeat failed tests, finishing the application suite and preparing the test report even when individual tasks don't run to completion. WorldBench 6 is easily removed from a system after testing. This helps ensure that the same software configurations and versions are tested on every PC that runs WorldBench, and that each PC returns to its original pretest state.