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.


An impressive result from AMD again, as it performs 14 percent faster than the Q9550 here, but even despite the fact it's second in the table to the Core i7-920, it still lags behind by a large 19.2 percent. Compared to the DDR2 based Phenom II X4 920 and 940 CPUs though it's 21.5 percent faster, or a notable 20 seconds - a very nice improvement!


The results are pretty much the same for many small files, except the Q9550 does a bit better here.

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.


Both the 955 and 945 Phenom II X4 CPUs perform very well again, pipping the Q9550 to the post and taking advantage of the DDR3 to edge ahead of the DDR2 940 CPU as well. The highly threaded Core i7-920 still dominates the table though with its massive lead, but the extra MHz do well for AMD.