File Compression & Encryption:

WinRAR

Website: WinRAR

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt a 176MB MPEG-2 file with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs with the same compression settings.



Again here the Phenom tri-core extends a bit of a lead, but the new AMD 7750 and 7550 CPUs perform very well compared to other dual core in a clock to clock comparison, with only the faster 3.1GHz 6000+ matching the 2.7GHz 7750 for performance in large file compression. In the small file compression test, there's not much difference however compared to the Intel E5200 - just two seconds compared to the 7550, unlike large compression where there is a solid 13 second difference.

7-Zip

Website: 7-Zip

Our community requested the inclusion of 7-Zip, a free compression tool that is an alternative to WinRAR and we've obliged accordingly. Using the internal benchmark this 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 left the benchmark to accumulate 10 runs using a 32MB Dictionary size in order to get a solid, average result.


7-Zip seems to love clock speed over core count, as the 2.1GHz Phenom tri-core sits at bottom by a notable margin here, just like the 3.1GHz 6000+ sits comfortably at the top. However in a clock to clock comparison the new AMD Kumas are faster than both the older AMD K8s and Intel E5200 by a few hundred MIPS - another positive result for the AMD.