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.



In terms of file compression, the results are very good for AMD as the X2 550 BE more or less equals the Intel E7400 when overclocked, and even its stock clock performance is within a second of the highly overclocked Intel E5200 and Athlon II X2 250. Again, like usual, it's much better than the AMD CPUs that have gone before, and at stock speeds at least it's notably faster than the Intel CPUs too.

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.


There is very little difference between the overclocked Intel E7400 and Phenom II X2 550 here - despite the clock speed difference the faster memory performance makes up for it. That said, the much cheaper Athlon II X2 250 is also within a whisker of these two CPUs as well - clearly indicating that the L3 cache makes no difference here.

At stock speeds the 550 again clearly dominates the field thanks to its clock speed, and even for a generally AMD dominated benchmark its clearly faster.