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Test Setup And Software Settings

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System Hardware
HardwareDetails
Motherboard (LGA 1156)Gigabyte P55A-UD6 (Rev. 1.0); Chipset: P55; BIOS: F7d (01/19/2010)
ProcessorIntel Core i7-870 (45nm, 2.93 GHz, 4 x 256KB L2 and 8MB L3 Cache, TDP 95W)
DDR3 Memory (Dual-Channel)
4 x 2GB DDR3-1600 (OCZ OCZ3G2000LV4GK)
Hard DriveA-Data Flash SSD S592 128GB
SATA 3 Gb/s, 64MB Cache
GraphicsSapphire Radeon HD 5850
GPU: Cypress (725 MHz); Graphics RAM: 1GB GDDR5 (2,000 MHz); Stream Processors: 1,440
Power SupplyPC Power & Cooling, Silencer 750EPS12V 750W
System Software & Drivers
Operating SystemWindows 7 Ultimate X64
Updated 2010-01-11
Drivers and Settings
Intel Chipset DriversChipset Installation Utility Ver. 9.1.1.1025
ATI Graphics DriversCatalyst 9.12


Files for Testing

  • 30 JPEGs (67.5MB)
  • 21 PDF documents (123MB)
  • 4 Excel files (9MB)
  • 10 PowerPoint presentations (67MB)
  • 17 Word documents (41MB)
  • The entire OpenOffice 3.1.1 installation library (341MB)

Total size: 650MB

Application Benchmarks and Settings
BenchmarkDetails
7-ZipVersion 9.1 beta
LZMA
1. Syntax "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA -mx=9"
2. Syntax "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA -mx=5"
LZMA2
3. Syntax "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=9"
4. Syntax "a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=5"
ZIP
5. Syntax "a -tzip -r -mx=9"
6. Syntax "a -tzip -r -mx=5"
Benchmark: 2010-THG-Workload
FreeArcVersion 0.60
1. Syntax "a -r -mx -ld1600m"
2. Syntax "a -r -m4 -s128m"
Benchmark: 2010-THG-Workload
WinRARVersion 3.92 Beta 1
RAR
1. Syntax "a -r -m5"
2. Syntax "a -r -m3"
ZIP
3. Syntax "winrar a -afzip -r -m5"
4. Syntax "winrar a -afzip -r -m3"
Benchmark: 2010-THG-Workload
WinZip 14Version 14.0 Pro (8652)
WinZIP Commandline Version 3
ZIP
1. Syntax "-a -ee -p -r"
2. Syntax "-a -en -p -r"
ZIPX
3. Syntax "-a -ez -p -r"
4. Syntax "-a -el -p -r"
Benchmark: 2010-THG-Workload
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Comments
Read the comments on the forums
amillion 11/03/2010 10:53
Hide
-2+

Aw no you didn't test PK-ZIP!!

Anonymous 11/03/2010 11:44
Hide
-4+

I have used 7-Zip for a while, hats of to the Developers

mi1ez 12/03/2010 12:09
Hide
-3+

Bloody hell! PK-zip! not used that in over 10 years!

Anonymous 12/03/2010 13:20
Hide
-5+

Great article. Always used WinRAR and never really took 7-Zip seriously, but may now!

mi1ez 12/03/2010 13:47
Hide
-1+

Can't remember why I started using 7zip, but I certainly won't be changing any time soon!

Anonymous 12/03/2010 13:56
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-3+

Thanks for a nice article. One potentially important aspect of archiving does not seem to be mentioned, and it would be really useful to see it considered. This is the archive format: solid or non-solid.

By default 7-Zip uses solid compression, which gives it an advantage in compression ratios, particularly when compressing lots of relatively small files. Conversely, WinRAR use non-solid compression by default, which provides a significant performance advantage if you want access specific files within the archive rather than only extracting the complete archive.

wild9 13/03/2010 02:29
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-2+

Would it be possible to use GPU's for this kind of task?

In terms of which compression program I use, I prefer WinRAR. I often work with huge video files and a limited amount of disk space, so what I do is RAR the files to a smaller size (some compress really well), so that they can be batch processed them at a later date (transcoded from uncompressed AVI to Divx). I find WinRAR fast and flexible; it's cool being able to alter the priority and compression profile on-the-fly.

Anonymous 13/03/2010 15:51
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-1+

As a Linux user I use the default compression tool which happens to be 7-Zip.

jamesedgeuk2000 15/03/2010 12:56
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-0+

So 7zip is the best? we already knew that! why did you even bother with winzip? were not running 98SE here, .zip file functionality has been native to windows for almost a decade making winzip about as useful as the pkzip.exe it replaced

wifiwolf 15/03/2010 19:34
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-0+

I've been using winrar since early 90s. It was always much better than zip though arc was nice for executables. Never bothered to look for others. But 7zip really impressed since the difference in compression is marginal whether best compression or default is used while time compressing is very impressive. Its important though to test that theory about using solid archives. I've always avoid solid archives because they're harder to recover from errors and you can't access individual files.

smartroad 21/03/2010 10:18
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-0+

What about windows built in zip folder thingy ;)

wasabi-warrior 22/03/2010 01:51
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-0+

7zip is really good, but i use IZArc (yeah, i kno, uve never heard of it) simply because its tiny and ive never had a file type it couldnt open. People are always sending me weird file types. We should have a file compatability test for the 4 compression programs just tested, see if they actually are useful at opening different compressed files.

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