We are pleased to announce the release of the public beta for PerformanceTest v7, the latest version of our popular PC benchmarking and speed testing suite.

Version 7 features a lengthy list of improvements, such as a new DirectX10 3D test which will help users assess the performance of newer graphics cards, and the new Visualised Physics test which is a fun, customizable way to see the new 3D physics test at work. The new, intuitive graphical interface makes it simple for all users to access detailed information about their hardware components and drivers, or to quickly submit or download baselines for comparison from the improved baseline selection menu. We've also overhauled the entire 2D test suite and intensified other tests to keep your benchmarks more updated for comparisons between systems.

Please participate in our PerformanceTest v7 public beta and let us know what you think about our changes. A full list of new features can be viewed from the PerformanceTest forum.

Network World (a publication aimed at networking professionals) have conducted The Chear Choice test, which was a comparison of the features, advantages and disadvantages of nine wireless discovery and connection tools.

The results are in and they've dubbed PassMark's WirelessMon as the Clear Choice winner, commenting that WirelessMon was "...robust enough to enable diagnostic use throughout the enterprise..." as well as praising it for being "feature-rich and easy to use".

You can view their full article and scorecard for WirelessMon and other products online at: http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2008/111708-wlan-management-test.html ]]> wirelessmon press http://www.passmark.com/products/bitlinux.htm Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:00:00 GMT PassMark has just released BurnInTest Linux Version 2, which features a host of major additions and improvements that we hope will make stress-testing in Linux more flexible, efficient and simpler. Again, we'd like to thank those who participated and gave us their comments and feedback in our public beta.

To name a few major new features, we've added support for testing your USB ports using our USB 2.0 Loopback Plugs and we've added new command line parameters and a scripting feature that will allow you to quickly customise BurnInTest Linux to your specific test requirements. You can read a comprehensive list of improvements in BurnInTest Linux Version 2 at our What's New? page, or you can testdrive the new version personally by downloading a free evaluation copy from the BurnInTest Linux page.

Priced at only $49, BurnInTest Pro for Windows and BurnInTest for Linux remain the best and most affordable hardware testing solutions for hardware reliability, endurance and stability. Rely on BurnInTest to avoid delivering DOA hardware to your customers, and to ensure that you avoid costly server downtimes, data loss and system rebuilds due to hardware faults and defects. You can purchase a copy from our online store, with volume discounts applying for multiple license purchases.

For users who have purchased previous versions of BurnInTest Linux, we are pleased to offer you a free upgrade to our new version - please check out our upgrades page to receive your complimentary upgrade!

You can read PassMark's official Press Release for BurnInTest for Linux 2.0 here.

This new build corrects a license warning message.

You can download this minor upgrade by checking out our BurnInTest Software Download page.

More details on all previous improvements we've made to BurnInTest can be found on our What's New? page.

From our results, it is clear that PC performance is a critical focus for many antivirus publishers for 2009, with many publishers showing improvement in our benchmark tests (compared to previous versions). You can find out if it's worth upgrading your existing AntiVirus product from our newest edition of PassMark's AntiVirus Performance Report for Windows Vista, which now includes new product results from publishers such as Trend Micro, McAfee, Sunbelt, Zone Alarm, GData, Panda, SourceNext, BitDefender and F-Secure.

Just a few of the more significant improvements we've made to the Zoom Search Engine include:

1. A brand new User Interface, which has been designed with ease-of-use and flexibility in mind;
2. A new Search Algorithm which produces even more relevant results for your audience, and gives you greater control of your search results with new preference settings;
3. The introduction of Custom Meta Fields, which mean you can build your own simple custom databases with a multi-criteria search without the hassle of actually setting up a database! You can see a demonstration and find out how to apply this feature to your website at our Fruits-R-Us demo site.
4. Word Stemming, which helps your web audience find what they're looking for more quickly by allowing searches to match words which are similar or derivatives of each other (e.g. a search for 'boat' will match 'boats' and 'boating').

You can see the full list of major changes we've made here and view some screenshots at this thread.

We'd love for you to participate in our beta and tell us how we can make Zoom Search Engine work better for you.

That aside, how well does Intel's latest offering perform in comparison to your current PC? To answer this question, we've released the CPU mark for the Intel Core i7 920 in our CPU charts today. PassMark Software has discovered that, despite being the slowest CPU of the new Intel Core i7 Range, the Intel Core i7 920 still rates as the best performing single CPU solution on the market today with a CPU mark of 5,907. At the time of writing, the closest desktop CPU mark is from the AMD Phenom with a CPU Mark of 2,647 and only a small number of high-end server machines with multiple CPUs perform better than the Core i7. We expect even better results from the faster models in the range, the Core i7 940 and 965.

You can find out how your current CPU compares to the Core i7 920 at CPU Benchmarks - the world's largest CPU benchmarks site, updated with new benchmarks daily!

Build 1034 fixes a crash problem on some systems (mostly reported on Windows XP, Sevice Pack 3) where, after standard Disk and RAM tests were run for a few hours, BurnInTest may have disappeared with no error messages. In addition, we've made a correction to setting the CD burn test drive under Preferences, changed the mechanism that checks for the required DirectX Direct3D as the previous method did not work on some Windows 2003 Servers. We've also enhanced the mechanism to report memory hardware read errors in the Memory stress test.

You can download this minor upgrade by checking out our BurnInTest Software Download page.

More details on all previous improvements we've made to BurnInTest can be found on our What's New? page.

Build 1018 adds support for ATOM CPU hyperthreading and now detects the number of CPUs in your machine. This new build also provides you with extended information on model numbers for newer CPUs and CPU L2 cache sizes (for newer Intel models). Additionally, we've fixed a small startup problem for an unreleased CPU and corrected a rare crash bug which could occur when saving a report or performing an HDD benchmark (where a physical disk is numbered greater than three).

More details on what improvements we've made to PerformanceTest can be found on our What's New? page.

Download and testdrive PerformanceTest v6.1 build 1018 today!

Over the past two months, we've put 27 AntiVirus Products through 14 varied benchmark tests measuring a product's impact on system performance. Check out our report and find out how your AntiVirus performs in comparison to the rest of the industry!

We would love to hear your feedback on improvements or issues with the Beta release, so we can work on making BurnInTest for Windows better for you. Read the extended features list in this release and download the beta today!

We've compared Chrome's Javascript engine with IE's and Firefox's respective engines, measuring its performance with a benchmark using Javascript index files generated with the Wrensoft Zoom Search Engine. You may be surprised by our results!

You can read about how the new features in BurnInTest For Linux v2 will make stress testing easier and more efficient on our forums. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on this beta release so we can work towards making BurnInTest For Linux better for you. Download the beta and join the discussion today!

We've written an informative article about how you can use BurnInTest to test whether your USB flash drive has the amount of storage it claims to and also test the ability of the drive to store and retrieve data without corruption.

PassMark Software Pty Ltd
Suite 202, Level 2
35 Buckingham Street
Surry Hills 2010
Sydney Australia.

Our phone and fax number haven't changed, but for your records, please note our new address!