14 DAY TRIAL // AV-Comparatives has published the results of a new anti-virus testing research, revealing what could at this point be the best and most reliable security products for Windows 8.1.
A number of 20 different anti-virus products, all fully compatible with Windows 8.1 and using the default settings, have been put to the test, including products such as avast! Free Antivirus 2014, AVG 2014, Bitdefender Antivirus 2014, NOD32 Antivirus 7.0, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2014, and Panda Cloud Antivirus Free 3.0.
Security researchers analyzed the impact on system performance when performing common tasks, such as file copying, archiving, unarchiving, encoding and transcoding, installing and removing apps, launching programs, downloading files, and running PC Mark 8 benchmarks.
“We simulated various file operations that a computer user would execute: copying different types of clean files from one place to another, archiving and unarchiving files, encoding and transcoding audio and video files, converting DVD files to iPod format, downloading files from the Internet, launching applications, etc,” the official results explain.
As far as the activity of downloading files is concerned, all but two products performed very fast, namely Trend Micro's and Emsisoft's apps. More anti-virus solutions might actually have an impact on the speed of copying files, including AVG, ESET NOD32, F-Secure, McAfree, and Microsoft’s Security Essentials.
Overall, Baidu, Bitdefender, and Kaspersky Lab are sharing the leading position with an AV-C score of 90 points, a PC Mark score of 98.8 percent and a total rating of 188.8. Avira and Fortinet come next, while the last places in the chart go to Trend Micro and Kingsoft.
“We want to make clear that the results in this report are intended only to give an indication of the impact on system performance (mainly by the real-time/on-access components) of the anti-virus products in these specific tests. Users are encouraged to try out the software on their own PC’s and see how it performs on their own systems,” security experts explained in the result papers.
Overall, the Advanced+ rating of the security institute was received by Baidu, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Avira, Fortinet, ESET, Lavasft, Qihoo, AVG, Avast, and Sophos, while the Advanced award was offered to F-Secure and Panda.
Keep in mind however that this new research does not represent the accuracy of the tested security products when it comes to removing viruses and protecting your computer from malware, as it only tested the impact on system performance when running on a Windows 8.1 device.