WorldBench 5 is the fifth generation of PC World's industry-standard benchmarking application. Designed to measure the performance of today's wide range of personal computers, WorldBench 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. WorldBench 5 debuted in July 2004.
We use WorldBench 5 to test desktop, notebook, and tablet PCs, as well as to support our testing of graphics boards, hard drives, and other products. An important note: Because WorldBench 5 uses a completely new set of applications, and because we've
updated WorldBench's
baseline system, the
scores you see our September 2004 and future issues cannot be compared in any way with
scores from older versions of WorldBench.
An Up-To-Date BenchmarkWorldBench 5 runs on PCs using the Home, Professional, Media Center, and Tablet PC versions of Windows XP. Fifteen applications (counting the components of Office XP), listed below, make up the WorldBench 5 suite. We selected this group for their mass-market appeal, stability, market share, and variety.
PC World has always believed that application-
based benchmarking is a better way to quantify computer performance than esoteric synthetic methods. WorldBench 5 runs--albeit in an extremely compressed way--many of the same tasks that average users perform on their PCs every day.