How We Test
Have questions about our charts? We have answers.Editors of PC World
How do the charts work?
Each month we test the latest PCs and notebooks, plus products from a rotating selection of other categories such as digital cameras, hard drives, graphics boards, monitors, PDAs, printers, rewritable DVD drives, and scanners.
We run each new product through a battery of performance tests at our PC World Test Center, and then we pass it along to an experienced reviewer who appraises its ease of use, design quality, and usefulness. Our next step is to compare these results directly with those of previously reviewed products in the same product category--for example, results for a 17-inch LCD monitor with results for other 17-inch LCDs. A product's final star rating reflects results from our hands-on evaluation and lab performance tests, plus its breadth of features and its vendor's support policies. We factor in price only in determining our value-based Best Buy awards.
As new versions of products are released, we remove older ones from the chart, along with discontinued products. Product configurations listed in the charts reflect the products as tested; vendors may change components subsequently, so the performance you get with a like product may not match our published results. More-detailed product configurations and scores, along with capsule reviews, photos, and current prices are available from links in the charts.
What does the WorldBench 5 score mean?
It's a measure of how fast a particular desktop PC or notebook can run a mix of common business applications as compared with our baseline machine--a high-end PC with a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 FX-51 processor and 1GB of RAM, as well as an NVidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics card with 256MB of RAM. For example, a PC that scores 150 is 50 percent faster than the baseline system. See our WorldBench 5 page for more information.
Where do the scores for reliability, support quality, and support policies come from?
Reliability and support quality scores for PCs are based on surveys of PC World readers, compiled for our annual feature on reliability and service (see our most recent article). The policies score is based on the support policies that the vendor offers, including the length of warranties and the hours of technical support provided.