Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2014

Pros Very good score for malware-blocking. Accurate spam and phishing detection. Firewall Booster aids Windows Firewall. Checks social media privacy settings, links. Online Guardian offers wide-ranging parental control. Password management, form filling. Encrypted file storage can be sealed remotely. Impressive full-featured online backup and file-sharing.

Cons Hard to install on malware-infested systems. Too-rigid behavior-based detection blocked valid programs. Limited parental control. More performance impact than many. Parental control system seriously flawed. Password management is awkward; form-filler not accurate. Bottom Line On top of the features in Trend Micro's entry-level suite, Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2014 adds advanced parental control, password management, and online backup and file-sharing. However, only the backup system really shines.

By Neil J. Rubenking

There are two main reasons you'd choose to purchase a security suite rather than assemble a collection of individual security tools. First, it's generally a lot less expensive. Second, having all of your security components integrated into one product tends to reduce the overall impact on performance. Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2014 ($89.95 per year direct, for three licenses) is definitely cost-effective, but it's not nearly as well-integrated as some of its competition.

This product is closer to a security bundle than an integrated suite. With a few exceptions, the main suite portion is identical to Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2014 ($79.95). For $10 more, the mega-suite adds Trend Micro DirectPass for password management ($14.95), Trend Micro SafeSync for online backup and file sharing ($39.95), and parental control from Trend Micro Online Guardian for Families ($49.95). Those components would cost over $100 if purchased separately.

On the other hand, DirectPass, SafeSync, and Online Guardian each require a full, separate installation process. Getting the whole suite installed took significantly longer than most. In addition, the four installations ate up an impressive amount of disk space—over a gigabyte!

Good at Blocking Malware Attack
The antivirus protection in this suite is precisely the same as what's offered by Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014, so you'd do well to read that review first. For this review, I'll simply summarize my findings.

Trend Micro earned an impressive 9.2 out of 10 points in my malware blocking test. Of all products tested using my current collection of malware samples, only AVG Internet Security 2014 and Ad-Aware Pro Security 10.5 scored higher, both with 9.4 points. For more on how I perform and score this test, see How We Test Malware Blocking.

Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2014 malware blocking chart

Trend Micro was also especially effective at blocking access to dangerous websites; it blocked 95 percent of those I tried. It didn't do as well when challenged to clean up a dozen malware-infested systems. Just getting it installed took a lot of back and forth with tech support. It scored 5.8 points overall, just so-so. Best scores in this test went to Bitdefender Total Security (2014), AVG, and Norton 360 (2014)with 6.6, 6.4, and 6.3 points respectively. The article How We Test Malware Removal explains how my malware removal test works.

Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2014 malware removal chart

Trend Micro skips traditional antivirus lab tests, but participates with the more innovative tests performed by AV-Test and AV-Comparatives. It gets good marks, especially in the whole-product real-world test by AV-Comparatives. The chart below summarizes recent test results; for more information about the tests, see How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests.

Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2014 lab tests chart

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Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2014

Pros Very good score for malware-blocking. Accurate spam and phishing detection. Firewall Booster aids Windows Firewall. Checks social media privacy settings, links. Can block transmission of private data. Secure deletion.

Cons Hard to install on malware-infested systems. Too-rigid behavior-based detection blocked valid programs. Somewhat limited parental control. More performance impact than many. Bottom Line Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2014 offers more features than many suites, but not all components are top-notch. It displayed more of an impact than many in my hands-on performance test.

By Neil J. Rubenking

There's a trend among some security vendors to enhance their entry-level antivirus product with features more commonly found in a security suite. Of course, doing so raises the bar for the company's actual security suite. Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2014 ($59.95 direct; $79.95 for three licenses) definitely rises to the challenge. It takes the full range of features found in Trend Micro's standalone antivirus and adds a significant collection of additional security components.

The main window for this suite summarizes your security status with a great big icon, in most cases a green checkmark indicating full protection. If there's anything wrong with your security configuration, you just click a button to fix it. This window also summarizes recent security activity; additional tabs offer access to more security features. Three tabs labeled Privacy, Data, and Family house most of the suite-specific features.

If the product's appearance isn't to your liking, you can replace the main window's background. The product comes with eight widely varied background images, flowers, clouds, stars, and more. Or choose an image of your own to truly personalize the installation.

This suite shares the same antivirus protection found in Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014, along with quite a few other security features. You'll definitely want to read that review for full details. I'll summarize my evaluation of the shared features here.

Better Defense than Cleanup
Getting Trend Micro installed on twelve test systems for malware removal testing took hours of back-and-forth with tech support, including quite a bit of remote control diagnosis and repair. Trend Micro earned two stars for installation experience and 5.8 points for malware removal. The best scores among products tested with my current malware collection went to Bitdefender Internet Security (2014), AVG Internet Security 2014, and Norton Internet Security (2014). For a full explanation of how I test malware removal, see How We Test Malware Removal.

Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2014 malware removal chart

With 94 percent detection and 9.2 points, Trend Micro fared much better in my malware blocking test. Only AVG and Ad-Aware Pro Security 10.5 scored better against the same malware collection. Trend Micro also did a great job blocking access to malware-hosting websites. To learn just what goes into this test, please see How We Test Malware Blocking.

Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2014 malware blocking chart

Like Symantec, Trend Micro downplays the value of old-fashioned static malware detection tests and praises dynamic, real-world tests. Trend Micro's technology took the highest rating in the whole-product dynamic test by AV-Comparatives, and it also did well in AV-Test's three-way certification test. To learn more about the testing labs summarized in the chart below, please read How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests.

Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2014 lab tests chart

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Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014

Pros Excellent score in malware-blocking test. Impressive blocking of malicious URLs. Accurate antiphishing and antispam protection. Bonus firewall booster blocked many exploit attacks.

Cons Installation on some malware-infested test systems required hours of remote-control support. Good-not-great score in hands-on malware cleanup test. Behavior-based detection suspects or even quarantines valid programs. Bottom Line Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014 focuses on resisting the very newest malware attacks, and does a good job. Its behavior-based detection can be over-enthusiastic, but it offers accurate phishing and spam protection and a firewall booster that can block exploit attacks.

By Neil J. Rubenking

We all agree that "antivirus" these days refers to a product that protects against all kinds of malicious software, not just viruses. But should it do even more than that? The folks at Trend Micro want to offer full-scale security protection even in their entry-level product, so Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014 ($39.95 direct) adds spam filtering and a firewall booster, as well as an impressive antiphishing component.

The product's sparse main window uses one extra-large icon to show current security status; if it's anything but fully protected, you can click a button to fix the problem. From the mini-toolbar you can launch a scan, open the settings dialog, or check protection statistics. A second page titled "PC/Mobile" lets you create a rescue disk or launch a trial of Trend Micro's mobile protection.

The main window features a button bar at top and status bar at bottom in bold black and red. In between, in the main body of the window, you can swap in one of eight supplied background images. Clouds, fields, flowers, psychedelic patterns—the choices are quite varied. Don't like any of them? You can use your own picture!

Focus on Dynamic Testing
Trend Micro pulled out of Virus Bulletin's VB100 testing some years ago, on the basis that testing against a static malware collection just isn't relevant. They also don't participate in testing by ICSA Labs or West Coast Labs. The reviewer's guide for this product touts its ability to block zero-day threats, and indeed it received the top rating, ADVANCED+, in the grueling real-world protection test by AV-Comparatives.

AV-Comparatives does also run an on-demand detection test, but it's not precisely a static test. Each antivirus product gets a chance to scan and wipe out known malware, true, but the researchers also launch any samples that survive, giving the antivirus a chance to use behavioral detection and other dynamic technologies. Trend Micro passed this test with a STANDARD rating. Note that my own malware blocking test works in a very similar fashion.

German lab AV-Test evaluates products using a combination of static and dynamic tests. Each product can earn up to six points for Protection, Performance, and Usability. Trend Micro averaged 14.8 of 18 possible points in the most recent two tests.

Trend Micro's scores are good, but Bitdefender and Kaspersky participate in all of the lab tests that I follow and routinely earn top scores. For more about the labs and their testing methods, see How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests.

Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus+ 2014 lab tests chart

Mixed Installation Experience
Trend Micro installed without incident on nine of my twelve malware-infested test systems. To get past ransomware that blocks desktop access in another system, tech support recommended Trend's advanced bootable USB solution. It proved incompatible with my virtual machine configuration, but their old-school text-only Rescue CD totally solved my ransomware problem.

The remaining two systems caused me a lot of grief. On advice from tech support, I used the Trend Micro Anti-Threat Toolkit and several other in-house tools. Eventually, though, I had to turn over these systems for remote diagnosis and cleaning by a tech support agent, which took hours but ended in success for both systems.

An antivirus that installs on all twelve systems with little or no hassle displays a five-star installation experience. If all problems can be solved by applying a rescue CD or other ancillary tool, that's still good for four stars. When getting the product installed drags on into hours of remote control, that's not a great installation experience. Like Norton AntiVirus (2014), AVG Anti-Virus FREE 2014, and quite a few others, Trend Micro gets two stars for installation experience.

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Velocity Micro Edge Z55 (Summer 2013)

Pros New Haswell processor and Nvidia graphics. Lots of room for maintenance and upgrades.

Cons Plain looking case. Bottom Line The Velocity Micro Edge Z55 isn't the flashiest gaming desktop, but it combines top components, like a fourth-generation Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 GPU, with a healthy feature set for excellent performance and value.

By Brian Westover

When shopping for a serious gaming rig, it's easy to spend a lot of money on fancy designs and flashy features. But what really makes a difference on the gaming grid isn't an embellished tower case or funky internal design; it's hardware. The Velocity Micro Edge Z55 updates the single-card mid-tower with Intel's new fourth-generation Core i7-4470k quad-core processor and Nvidia's powerful new GeForce GTX 780 graphics card. It's not necessarily cheap, but it delivers exactly what gamers are looking for, performance that will lead them to victory.

Design and Features
The simple but stylish Edge Z55 dresses up the mid-tower PC with a sleek black plastic front panel that opens to reveal a tray-loading optical drive (an LG BD-ROM/DVD+-RW combo). The tower measures 18.2 by 9.2 by 20.7 inches (HWD)—just a little larger than the Digital Storm Virtue—but still small enough to tuck out of the way under a desk.

On top of the front panel, easily accessible, are four USB ports (two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0) and jacks for headphone and microphone. On the rear of the tower, you'll find several more USB ports (six USB 3.0, four USB 2.0), along with two Ethernet ports, connections for audio, and several display outputs—HDMI, DisplyPort (both full size and mini DisplayPort), and DVI output.

A window on the left side gives you a view inside, letting you see the major components—like an Nvidia GeForce GTX780 graphics card, a 750-watt power supply, air cooling, and the Asus Z87-Deluxe motherboard. Built into the motherboard is integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi, along with Bluetooth 4.0 and 3.0+HS, letting you connect all of your wireless headsets or peripherals. An external Wi-Fi antenna gives you excellent reception, and a magnetic mount means you can slap it on the side of the tower or to any metal on your desk. If you need to get into the tower for maintenance and upgrades, it's as easy as removing two thumbscrews at the back and sliding of the side panel.

Inside, you'll also find plenty of storage, with a 2TB, 7,200rpm hard drive providing storage for you game installs and media library, and two speedy 128GB solid-state drives (SSD) paired in RAID0 for 256GB of flash memory, offering short boot times and zippy performance. Even with all that room, Velocity Micro leaves the drives alone—aside from preinstalling Windows 8 (64-bit) and drivers for the graphics card and other components, there's nothing on the drives. Velocity Micro covers the Edge Z55 with a one-year warranty on parts and labor, with lifetime phone support.

Performance
Armed with Intel's fourth-generation Core i7-4470K quad-core processor—the same processor found in the Digital Storm Virtue—with overclocking up to 4.4GHz (up from the 3.5GHz base) and paired with 16GB of RAM. With the new processor, the Edge Z55 offers strong performance, cranking through PCMark 7 with a score of 7,295 points, topping almost every comparable system from the previous generation, including the Editors' Choice HP Envy Phoenix h9-1320t(4,033 points) and Maingear Potenza Super Stock (5,356 points). A Cinebench score of 9.64 points also puts it at the head of the pack, with the closest competitor being the similarly equipped Digital Storm Virtue (9.59 points). The Edge Z55 also finished our processor intensive multimedia tests with leading scores, finishing Handbrake in 29 seconds and Photoshop in 2 minutes 49 seconds.

The overclocked processor is joined by a potent Nvidia GeForce GTX780 GPU, with 3GB of dedicated memory. The results speak for themselves, with better than playable framerates in our gaming tests—83 frames per second in Aliens vs. Predator and 75 frames per second in Heaven, both at full resolution and high detail settings.

The Velocity Micro Edge Z55 offers a solid mid-range gaming desktop that packs in a lot of features—a Blu-ray drive, 2TB hard drive, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth—on top of the a fourth-generation Intel Core i7 processor and a shiny new Nvidia graphics card. It's a combination that should serve you well on the gaming grid now, and will continue to feel fast in the future. It can't match the affordability of the Editors' Choice HP Phoenix h9-1320t, but it holds its own against other top performers, like the Digital Storm Virtue and the V3 Gaming Traverse.

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