Intel Core i7 Nehalem 965 XE 3.2GHz review

Page 13 - Performance:

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.

Results speak for themselves - difference is twice bigger at the same frequency. Odd thing is that increasing the Core i7 965 XE frequency by 20% gives insignificant raise in performance, unlike in previous CPU test we've done.

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.

With this type of operations multi-threading is everything. The difference between two and eight parallel threads is indeed about 4 times bigger, we can only expect that the quad Core 2 would perform proportionally to our E8500.