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 the MPEG-2 source file from our video encoding test with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.



The faster the core clock is better suited here and, for a change, DDR3 performance is actually considerably better in most cases. For the most part, this mixes everything up nicely for AMD in the "affordable" CPU range - intermingling with the Q9450 and pushing down the Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 by several seconds - the extra core or two seem to make a bit of positive difference.

In small compression in particular, the Phenom II X3 720 with DDR2 noses up against the more expensive Phenom II X4 920 which also has an extra core.

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 benefits from cores and frequency mostly and, in actual fact, the lower latency DDR2 setups perform better than the DDR3 in three out of four situations. The Intel CPUs benefit from a greater efficiency here and the E8500 outweighs the triple-core Phenom IIs by quite a margin. Meanwhile, the Intel quad-cores also outperform the AMD quads too for the most part.