AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Review

Page 9 - Performance: WinRAR & 7-Zip

WinRAR 3.80

For this test we choose the most popular and favored by all archiver - WinRAR (3.80). The program has integrated benchmark, with which you could for example measure how much time will it take to compress say 100MB source code or how many megabytes will get compressed for one minute. Instead of this we did something more true to real life, being more similar to often occurring scenarios and all. We took a 500MB mp3 file directory (122 files they were) and timed how long would it take to for the music to get compressed into *.rar archive and then get decompressed.

Good difference between Phenom II X4 810 and the older 9850 X4, which is about the same as the dual core Intel configuration.

7-zip

7-zip is open source arhiver (licensed under LGPL), that recently wan the awards for "Technical design" and "Best project" of SourceForge.net. 7zip uses several highly effective algorithms, distinctively Bzip2 and LZMA, thus frequently being more effective than formats such as ACE and RAR, which unlike 7z are commercial. Of course 7-zip in interesting for us because of its multi-threading too. In order to test the effectiveness of Core i7 and the rest of the bunch with it we used the integrated benchmark that measures how many millions of instructions per second (MIPS) the processor can execute.

Results are quite predictable. Only interesting thing is how does Phenom II 955 BE fares compared to Core i7 920. AMD is not far behind its more expensive rival, still the 8 threads and the triple channel memory of the Intel CPU are indeed important.