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.


In large file compression there's a significant ten second advantage compared to the two Intel CPUs in the multithreaded WinRAR test, and as such, the green dot is very much lower than the trend line above.


In small file compression the lead is still to the same ten second advantage over the Intel CPUs, however the 4.2GHz E7500 stretches a slight lead over the 3.5GHz Q6600 as well, bringing the trendline downward a bit. The green blob in the graph above is still below the line though, indicating a better value performance from AMD.

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 ten runs using a 32MB Dictionary size in order to get a solid, average result.


Whereas the AMD shone in WinRAR, in 7-Zip the opposite is the case as it falls to the bottom of the table. We checked the result to make sure it was consistent and the E7500's higher clock speed makes up for the core count deficit compared to the AMD, however the Q6600 at only 200MHz slower but with four cores to the 720 Black Edition's three, allows it to steamroller out ahead with a 74 percent MIPS performance advantage.