Multi-tasking with 7-Zip and mplayer

Websites: www.7-zip.org and www.mplayerhq.hu

Multi-tasking is a phrase with which we're all familiar, as most of us are now used to running multiple applications at the same time. However, to run multiple applications well you need a powerful (ideally multi-core) CPU and plenty of RAM.

Our multi-tasking test performs a massive file backup (with encryption) using 7-Zip, while simultaneously playing back a HD movie file using mplayer, making it a demanding test for any PC.

Overall Score

The overall score is an unweighted mean average of the scores of the three individual tests. A score of 1,000 means that the test system is as fast as our reference PC, which used a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 at stock speed, 2GB of Corsair 1,066MHz DDR2 memory, a 250GB Samsung SpinPoint P120S hard disk and an Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP motherboard. The scoring is linear, so a system scoring 1,200 points is 20 per cent faster than our reference system. Equally, a system scoring 1,200 is 4 per cent faster than a system scoring 1,150.

Cinebench R15 64-bit

Website: www.maxon.net

Cinebench uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a photo-realistic scene of some shiny balls and weird things (we miss the motorbike). The scene is highly complex, with reflections, ambient occlusion and procedural shaders so it gives a CPU a tough workout.

As Cinema 4D is a real-world application - used on films such as Spider-Man and Star Wars - Cinebench can be viewed as a real-world benchmark.

Power consumption

For the power consumption tests, we use the system standing idle at the desktop and use a power metre to measure the power draw at the wall. For the load test, we use Prime95's smallFFT test and take the peak power consumption.