At Australian PC User, we pride ourselves in the quality and independence of our editorial. This is a commercial as well as an ethical policy, because we know that readers expect nothing less. PC User is Australia’s top-selling technology magazine and our credibility is a key reason for our market leadership. We work hard to provide independent advice that readers can trust.
Listed prices
The prices in PC User's reviews were correct at the time of writing. As recommended retail prices often bear little resemblance to real-world prices, where possible, we’ve used the lowest common prices that we could find on Australian online retail sites. Where street pricing was unavailable, we’ve listed the RRP. However, note that pricing varies and changes rapidly, so be sure to shop around yourself. Start with the online retailers advertising in PC User, www.staticice.com.au and an Australian Google search. Remember to check out the delivery and other charges, too.
Our exclusive benchmarks
To ensure each product is evaluated as thoroughly as possible for our reviews, we use repeatable, transparent procedures reflecting real-world usage by readers. To achieve this aim, we use objective, quantifiable benchmarks whenever possible. Unfortunately, we found existing benchmark software didn’t go far enough for our aim of measuring real-world PC performance. So our hardware writer, Darren Yates, developed our own benchmark suite, UserBench, exclusively for PC User.
UserBench is Australia’s only home-grown benchmark suite, and we reckon it’s the world’s best. It brings a level of realism and precision never seen before. All the UserBench benchmarks are based on common, time-consuming tasks — video and image conversions and other tasks that tie up valuable PC time — as well as real games. They allow us to provide in-depth details including actual times, so you can see how long the system takes to accomplish these tasks.
How to read the results
Our benchmarks measure either time (in minutes and seconds) or a rate, such as video frames per second (fps) or data transfer measured in kilobytes or megabytes per second (KB/s or MB/s). For time-based benchmarks, lower results generally mean faster performance at a given task. The exception is UserBench Battery because you want a notebook’s battery to last as long as possible. For rate-measuring benchmarks, higher results are better. In particular, for gaming, you should look for at least 50fps on average, but preferably more (to allow for future games). For our benchmarks that include a number of different tests, we calculate an overall score. Higher overall scores are better, with a reference score of 10 being the performance of a 2GHz Pentium 4 desktop PC with 1GB of memory running Windows XP Home Edition SP2.
Other benchmarks
We occasionally use third-party benchmarks where they are best of breed. These include HD Tach 3, which is used to test the data transfer rates of hard drives.
UserBench benchmarks explained
