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.


In large file compression, again the performance is a little low compared to the corresponding Intel quad core CPUs, but the Phenom IIs are only a few seconds behind the Q9550 and are both two seconds ahead of the DDR2 Q9450. The extra MHz doesn't make too much difference here compared to the 2.6GHz Phenom II with a faster memory controller clock, however they are all several seconds faster than the original Phenom X4s which is certainly a positive result.


The Phenom IIs are slightly better than the DDR2 quad core Intel Q9550 and Q9450 CPUs here, but fall behind the DDR3 ones (although that platform costs more again). They are also notably faster than the original Phenom X4s by a very good ~20 percent!

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.


Again the Phenom IIs perform where we'd expect - the X4 940 is right between the Intel Q9550 and Q9450, with the X4 920 only a fraction behind this too. The higher MHz again does the business for AMD, and yet again we see a four percent increase in clock to clock performance between Phenom quad core generations.