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 WinRAR, the overclocked Core i7 920 is six to ten seconds, or ten to 15 percent faster than the Core i7 965 and 24 to 40 percent quicker than the original Core i7 920 which is a huge gain. Compared to the previous generation, we're seeing significant and noticeable gains in compression times in the region of 20 to 30 seconds in this short test.

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 7-Zip performance scales wonderfully because it likes cores and memory bandwidth as much as it likes MHz. It has a 23 percent performance improvement over the Core i7 965 and is 49 percent faster than the i7 920 at stock speeds - virtually a 1:1 performance improvement with clock speed! What's impressive is that it's a massive 85 percent faster than the QX9770 here as well.