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.



For large file compression the AMD 7850 BE is yields an impressive performance, outperforming even the overclocked Intel E5200 when overclocked and nosing in behind at stock speeds too! The difference between the 7850 and 7750 Black Editions is a very small three seconds though, which is understandable for the 100MHz clock difference.

In small file compression the Intel E5200 overclocked does a number on the AMD's but generally their performance is very good at stock speeds, vastly out performing the E5200 at its native 2.5GHz by some 20 seconds or some 15 percent. The jump from 7750 to 7850 BE is again very small at only two seconds.

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 7850 BE actually lags behind the old 3.1GHz 6000+ here by just 100 MIPS, however when overclocked to 3.1GHz itself, it throws in an extra 500 MIPS. At stock speeds the AMDs trounce the Intel E5200, but when both are overclocked the tables turn completely.