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.



As expected, the overclocked Intel E5200 has the best performance here, although there's not that much difference between it and the overclocked Athlon X2 7750 BE, and in fact, the AMD nudges closer into the green value area despite being six seconds slower. According to the results and graph the 6000+ is also better value than the stock clocked 7750 BE too, and even the 5200+ affords pretty good value, whereas the stock clocked Intel E5200 and AMD tri-core sit very close to the bad red value area.



Unlike the above though, in the small file compression test the overclocked Intel E5200 extends its lead out ahead of everything else by a large margin and increases its value accordingly. The overclocked AMD Athlon X2 7750 BE and stock clocked 5200+ both nose ahead in the value graph, even if the 5200+ is quite slow in the actual test. Despite the fact the Phenom X3 8450 sits half way up the table though, it still doesn't do enough to increase its value that much.

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.



The overclocked Intel E5200 again extends a huge lead and better value in 7-Zip, whereas the overclocked 7750 Black Edition and stock clocked 6000+, 5200+ and even 4850e form a nice trend-line of pretty uniform value the same distance from the green corner. Without overclocking, the 7750 BE yields a worse value than everything, despite its pretty high performance, and the Intel E5200 at stock clock or even the Phenom X3 8450 both sink further into the red.