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.



The WinRAR tests show nothing we haven't already seen in the other tests - the 975 EE is slightly faster than the 965 EE, though all Core i7 CPUs were roughly as fast as each other as they all overclocked to roughly the same level due to cooling constraints. The AMD 955 BE is off the pace though, taking 96 seconds to compress the small files and 103 seconds to compress the large; the 920 did the same tasks in 81 seconds and 77 seconds respectively.

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.


7-Zip shows much the same results as WinRAR, which ranks on the list of surprises somewhere between the Sun rising and MPs not wanting to disclose the full extent of their expense-account abuses. The 975 EE is slightly faster than the 965 EE, while the AMD 955 BE is off the pace of the Core i7s.