Everybody knows that more is better. More RAM means more programs can run at
the same time. More GPU power means more
FPS in your games. And more mother-in-laws means more time spent
with family. There are downsides. Well, mine is great. But in a world where
malware is seemingly more dangerous than ever, it would only be logical to assume
that more antivirus software is going to keep her more safer, right? I mean, why
not? It used to be that running even one antivirus package would significantly
impact your PC's performance. But these days, computers are so much faster that
Windows includes its own AV software that most people probably don't even
notice is running. So, could we run two,
three, or 10 antivirus tools to create
the safest PC on the internet? That's
what we're here to find out with some help from our sponsor, Threat Locker.
Threat Locker is a totally different way to keep your entire business network
safe, but we'll talk more about that later. For now, spoiler alert, more is
not always better. Let's see how that
goes. Let's kick this off with a good old-fashioned boot time test. In front
of me are two virtually identical systems with Core i5 processors, 16 gigs
of DDR5 memory, an RTX 3050GPU, and a
terabyte of fast NVMe storage. Both have
a fresh install of Windows 11, and all the latest drivers. But there's one key
difference. This one relies solely on Microsoft's antivirus. Not that one,
Microsoft Defender. As for the other, well, we just plum had a hard time
choosing between all the options, especially with all of the inbreeding
between AV companies these days. Did you know that Avast, Avera, AVG, and Norton
are all the same company? Gen digital,
look it up. And they don't just share ownership. Norton and AVG actually use
Avast's AV engine these days. And a ver's engine gets used even by third
parties like VMware and F-Secure. Uh,
this one's booted by the way. Couldn't help noting that. This one not so
much. Is it still going? Anyway, the
TLDDR is we got confused. So, we crammed our second system full of as much
antivirus software as she would take and still connect to the internet. What's
the final count? I think 14. 14. My goodness.
And it's booted. Hold on. I have another fun one for you, though. Let's see how
long they take to shut
down. Wow, that one's done
already. Let's read some more lines. Ah,
yes. React to boot time. Oh, I can tell you all the antiviruses we have. Total
AV, Panda, Malware Bites, Quick Heal,
Avast, AVG, Adaware, ESET, Avira, Forct,
Heimdoll, Komodo, Clam, AV, and of
course, good old-fashioned Windows Defender. It is worth noting that a
couple of them do have reduced runtime protection when others are
detected. And I guess I'll talk about our sponsor real quick here because
we're still waiting. Uh, it's worth noting, by the way, our sponsor, Threat
Locker, doesn't really compete with any of the antivirus software that we're
showing off today. Threat Locker stops more than just malware. They even block
unapproved applications on your network with application allow listing. That
means that aside from being protected, your team can't be lured away from that
important report for a quick round of Battro during business hours. Okay,
finally, let's boot them back up and see how these systems feel. Let's start with
our control computer. Yep, that's file explorer. Yep, that's the system tray.
If I wanted to launch Steam, it seems like that'll happen in a perfectly
reasonable amount of time. Now, let's move over here where Oh my goodness, I
already have a popup to dismiss. Okay, file
explorer. This is a modern Core i5. That
was pretty quick for that one, actually. I mean, the system tray was still responsive. How long does it take to
launch Steam, though? Ah. Oh.
Oh. Oh my god. This poor system. Look at
them all. Malware bite 6%. Komodo 4 Vera
4%. Is Steam still launching?
It'll take a while.
Wow. Okay. I knew it was going to be bad. I didn't think it was going to be
like using my Windows 98 machine. I thought it would be uh this is awful,
but it's oh this is awful. And the funny
part is when we're not doing anything, the usage of all these doesn't seem that
bad. It's just that that's the whole thing, right? When they're idling in the
background, they're fine. But it's as soon as you start to do anything that
they're actively continuously monitoring what's going on and making sure that
it's okay and the system resource usage
goes oh my god did you see how long that
took to maximize boy that's crazy. Can Can I see
yours? Yours should be fine. Yeah. Mine works like a computer. This shouldn't
slow the GPU, isn't the Do you see that? That's terrible.
What the That is not the screen capture, guys. No, that's live happening
in person. That's wild. It's It's not even using
that much. No, it's at like 10%. Okay. What's yours? What's yours? One to 2%.
And this is way worse than you think because you might say, "Oh, what? It's
using 10 times as much resources. That's to be expected." But I think it's more
than that because yours is using 1% of like 1 and a half GHz. Mine is
using anywhere from 5 to 10%. But my CPU
is clocked way higher. Yeah. And I don't know if that's, you know, linear or
anything, but it's clear that my resource usage is more than it appears.
You're almost double the RAM, too. Oh, dude. How's my sto My storage seems
okay. Yeah, but I bet my storage becomes
a complete disaster as soon as I try to launch a program. So, let's both launch
Edge and look at the average response time. 3 2 1 click. Oh, okay. That didn't
work. Okay, let's launch File Explorer. Let's launch File Explorer. Okay, ready?
3 2 1 click. So, you went up to
7. Yeah. Okay. No, that was
fine. Copilot. Let's launch Copilot. 3 2
1 Click.
Yeah, my storage is not hit that hard. I mean, it takes forever to do anything,
but it seems to be more down to the CPU that's struggling. Is this ever going to
launch? Did I click it? Yeah. Oh, dude. Yeah. Look, I got the spinny wheel. Oh, yeah. There you go. Wow. You want to see
worse? Plug in the USB key. Really?
Where did they go? Oh, that makes sense. They're going to lose their
minds. Okay. And so the race is how long
it takes for the folder to open. Well, just just see what happens when you plug
it in. Top USB 3 port here. Sure. Okay. Three, two, one.
Okay. Mine opens up. Oh, yeah. I got it.
I got it. Okay.
What? Look at my CPU usage. They all
want to scan it for threats. You better let it do it. Oh, it's got Oh. Oh. Oh,
good. gravy. Just say yes to a few of them. Oh, no. No. Oh, wait. Some of them
don't even ask me. Yep. They just start. Oh, no. So, my poor USB drive is at 95%
utilization right now. Even my NVMe SSD
is registering. You were 30% CPU there a second ago at 3
GHz. Okay. You want me to click yes? Click yes to a couple of them. That'll
give you some time to talk. Back before Al Gore invented the internet, the
primary way to exchange data was sneakeret. And the fight against malware
depended on knowing what that malware looked like on your disc or in your
system memory. Early PC antivirus suites then relied on databases of signatures
for known malware. So if your AV tool didn't know about a virus, it probably
wouldn't protect you from it. And it was a lot more work to get new signatures
than just clicking update and downloading them from the internet. Of
course, the damage a virus could do back then was also quite a lot more limited.
We weren't exactly banking online back in 1987. It wasn't until the '90s then
that antivirus turned into a serious industry. With the arrival of the
internet, PCs were interacting with each other like never before. And the problem
is that most desktop software really wasn't ready for the dangers of this new
level of connectivity. Looking at you, Outlook Express. Antivirus creators then
embraced having an easy way to get updates of these signatures or
definitions to their users. But then at the same time, virus writers found new
vectors of attack. email, Microsoft Office macros, Java, VBScript, and they
exploited them with new types of malware, often more quickly than
researchers could hope to respond to. Is
this still running? All right, more history, then. We started the '90s with
maybe a few hundred known viruses in the wild, and by 1999, the AV test database
had nearly 100,000 entries. AV makers like FPROT
tried to get out ahead of this rapid fire virus development with the first
use of heristic detection as we might recognize it today. That is analyzing a
program's behavior to recognize potential threats even if that malware
has never been seen before. But signatures were still a big piece of the
detection puzzle. And I mean big. By
2005, AV Tests database had more than tripled to almost 340,000 entries. And
the worst part is that was nothing. In 2007 alone, another 5 million unique
malware samples were added to the database. It went parabolic and it's
only gotten worse. So, yeah, it was easy
to rag on Norton and friends, and they did make it real easy. But between
massive databases of potential threats and the need to protect from more and
more vectors of attack, it's no wonder that antivirus packages kept using more
and more system resources causing system
slowdowns. And that was with just one of
them running. Let's try gaming on our system with 14 AVs. We haven't even
finished scanning this USB drive yet. Yeah, sure. Let's game. We did so many
takes while this was sitting here scanning.
I have 270 FPS. You're sure these systems are safe? I have 294. Oh, wait.
Gaming might be totally okay cuz it's not burdening our
GPU and our storage was actually doing
fine. Yeah, my RAM usage is way higher.
4 gigs higher and my CPU usage is
substantially higher. But this is interesting. I'm at a higher speed
though. Yours is turboing higher, probably because it's less burdened. But
the FPS is nearly identical. We just seem to be GPU bound. Yeah, that's
interesting. I think it might be because we're running RTX 3050s. These are
pretty low GPUs. Look at the process count
and the threads. You have double the threads.
That is wild. So, I think the only reason this isn't
impeding my gaming performance is that our GPU is just not powerful enough. I
mean, we're getting 230 frames a second. Yeah, but we're just we're not revealing
we're we're GPU bottlenecked. Yeah, clearly I have plenty of CPU left
over to run all this crap in the background. I think we might need a
couple higherend GPUs. I'll be right back. He brought us 5080s. We can't plug
these into our PSUs.
You didn't bring the 12 pin. Really? They don't include it anymore? Well, I
guess this is an opportunity to talk about our sponsor, Threat Locker. They take a different approach to keeping
your company's network safe. Following zero trust principles, Threat Locker
proactively blocks everything by default, only allowing what you decide
is absolutely necessary for your team to be productive. This approach means
Threat Locker doesn't require a lot of system resources. And it does more than
just limit which applications can be run. Elevation control allows standard
users to run specific applications with local admin privileges without ever
having that unnecessary privilege as a user. And threat locker detect
continuously monitors the behavior of trusted and untrusted applications and
will automatically respond based on the rules created by your IT specialists.
These policies are enforced in milliseconds whether or not your
endpoint is connected to the internet. Do you see this? What the
mine? No. No. This has got to be a driver issue. It's got to be a driver issue. Maybe my drivers didn't auto
install or my drivers probably took so long to autoupdate to the new card that
they that they haven't updated yet. Startup scan and pro. Oh my god. Oh,
your internet was off when you you booted up, too, cuz the cable fell out. Okay. Yeah, that's probably the issue.
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. It was a driver issue getting new ones installed. It's
freaking warm. Great hoodie. Terminally
online. But I'm too warm to wear it right now. Here we go. Holy,
dude. We're still in the loading screen and I'm pretty sure my CPU usage is
higher than last time. It's not good. I'll tell you that much. Cuz I'm at
1,000 FPS in this loading screen now. Y I think this is going to impact it more.
My clock speed is lower than it was compared to yours. I think
it's still going to be pretty respectable. I think so to be clear.
Wow. Let's let it settle in a little bit because you never know. Here, let's walk
up the stairs. All right. So there is no
doubt that if you have enough overhead, you can
absolutely impact the ability to run games at maximum performance. You're
about 20 frames lower than me, but realistically, we're looking at an RTX
5080, right? Yeah. And I'm only running
about 20 FPS lower than you. It's really not bad in a pretty CPUbound game. With
all of that said, it's very clear that these AV programs are heavy enough to
run that they can impact system performance, which isn't to say that
they're unnecessarily bloated. They're just doing a lot. Let's go back to our
history lesson. First introduced by McAfee in 2008, cloud-based antivirus
uses kind of the best of both worlds. Heristic detection to identify the
behavior of suspicious files and
constant checking against a continually updated online database of threats,
taking advantage of the spread of always on internet connections. It was a really
good idea, but Microsoft was about to upset the game board. After years of
ruthless attacks from Apple targeting Windows's security, Microsoft acquired
giant anti-spyware in late 2004 and quietly started work on what would
become Microsoft Defender Antivirus.
Starting with Windows 8, Defender was enabled on Windows PCs by default,
switching itself off if a third party AV tool was installed. And over the years,
Defender has evolved to the point where those third party AV tools are less
likely to feel needed. As of 2024, more
than half of American users use built-in antivirus protection like Microsoft
Defender or Apple's XProtect. And of those that use a third party solution,
only about half use a paid product. As a
result, recent years have seen significant consolidation in the
antivirus market. Intel bought McAfee back in 2010 only for it to end up in
the hands of Advent International, a private equity firm that is rumored to
be eyeing Trend Micro as well. And we mentioned Gen Digital earlier, formerly
Norton, who now owns four major AV brands. Other major brands have shifted
their sites to corporate clients with NextG Endpoint Protection and Management
Solutions, leaving the home market to lesserk known antivirus solutions, some
of which we installed here today. Before we go, then let's see how they handle
this little selection of malware that we've prepared for them. Oh, we're going
to intentionally infect them. We're going to remove the Ethernet. Oh, you did. Oh, no. You didn't. Are we?
I mean, they should be safe, right? They should be fine. Oh, this makes me deeply
uncomfortable. Jordan, they're mostly just test files. Okay. Mostly. Okay.
What do you want me to Oh, threat blocked. Hey, the system
works. Maybe. Oh, potential threat block. Oh, infected file move to
quarantine full. I mean, maybe you are safer. Maybe I am
safer. Nothing happened here yet. I feel safer. Okay. What am I supposed to try
to do? Ah, whatever you want here. Open up the danger zone. Open the danger
zone. Okay. Jokes. Yeah. Run something
in there. It'll be fine. Oh my god. Avoid.exe. Threat blocked. Good. Oh,
it's gone. Good. It's gone. Boom. Just like that. How about Vista?
Cannot access. It's still freaking out in the bottom corner here. It's malware
stopped. Windows chilled Windows. I'm
It's working.
Chilled Windows cannot access. Oh, dude. I think I think it's just removing. Oh,
there we go. I finally got a popup. Threats found. Yep.
Okay, so it's stopping me from doing it, too. Also working.
Mine's a lot more calm about it. They're working. Yeah.
And that was even after I told them, hey, look, don't bother scanning this
thing. Yeah, that's pretty cool. The point today was not to answer, you know,
which of these antivirus suites is the best? That was not what we set out to
do. What we set out to answer was, is more better? The answer is no. Pick one
good tool for real-time monitoring. And then if you must run additional tools,
just run them as single time scans. And
don't discount Microsoft Defender. I mean, it did work against all these
threats. Found the problems here, even if it might not find every threat. And
if you want enterprise or business protection, you're going to want to check out something entirely different,
like from Threat Locker, who sponsored this little experiment. We're going to have a link to them in the video
description. If you guys enjoyed this video, uh maybe you like the vibe of how
many USB devices can you plug into one computer. That was a lot of well, it was
pain, but also fun.