File Compression Performance

WinRAR

Website: WinRAR

Our custom-made file compression test is split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test compresses and encrypts a 176MB MPEG-2 file with the highest quality compression ratio.

The second test compresses and encrypts a folder of 400 photographs with the same compression settings.



The Athlon II tops the table, and while it matches the E5200 when compressing small files, it has a clear lead in when compressing large files when both CPUs are overclocked. At stock speeds, the performance of the Athlon II is also very good - outperforming the other CPUs as well.

7-Zip

Download from: 7-Zip
Our community requested the inclusion of 7-Zip, a free alternative to WinRAR, and we've obliged accordingly. We use the internal benchmark, which measures compression and decompression performance in MIPS and provides an average result. It is multi-threaded so takes advantage of the latest multi-core and SMT enabled CPUs. We leave the benchmark to accumulate ten runs using a 32MB Dictionary size in order to get a solid, average result.


Once again the Athlon II tops the tables here by a large margin, with 7-Zip taking advantage of the larger memory bandwidth, faster access and high clock speed over the overclocked E5200. Even at its stock frequency the Athlon II outperforms the other CPUs as well.