Resource Use

Antivirus software can be very resource hungry. With Microsoft’s knowledge of Windows, you’d think Defender would have an advantage here. While performing a full scan, it took up a peak of 275MB of RAM, with CPU use (a powerful quadcore Intel Core i7) hovering around 54.6 percent. When not in use, it used 152MB of RAM.

Bitdefender was much more resource-intensive. When idle, it used around 180MB of RAM, but when scanning, it had peaks of 780MB RAM use ( though around 400MB for most of the scan time), and CPU usage spiking at 98 percent, averaging about 70 percent. The price to pay for such fast scanning.

Meanwhile, we were very impressed with the impact of AVG. At idle, the software takes up 130MB of RAM, while in use it only takes up around 160MB. Better still, CPU use never went higher than 14 percent—a far cry from the stress Bitdefender puts the PC under. Winner:

AVG