File Compression & Encryption:

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.


The XFX nForce 790i Ultra SLI outperforms the rest of the boards with a top to bottom difference of around 16 to 17 seconds. The Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 board drops a few seconds behind the XFX 790i with either CPU, which is no doubt a little disappointing for the X48 chipset. The Core 2 Extreme QX9770 is generally around 20 seconds faster than the E8500, with an exception made for the XFX nForce 780i SLI which has only five seconds difference between the CPUs.


In small file compression things are a little more packed together – the performance gap between the QX9770 and E8500 is much smaller, as more emphasis is placed on the communication with the hard drive to record each individual file. The XFX 790i is now only two seconds faster than the Gigabyte with the QX9770, but it's also two seconds slower with the E8500 CPU installed.

File Decompression & Decryption:

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted.



Decompression is a little different – the XFX 790i board is a touch slower than the Gigabyte X48 in both tests, however at least it's consistent unlike the XFX 780i which didn't seem to like the QX9770 at all. All in all though, the field is only split by a few seconds, but both DDR3 boards are marginally faster overall.