Compression Performance: 7-Zip, MagicRAR, WinRAR, WinZip

Round-ups
By , published

We're taking a look at the the features, performance, and compression rates of four file archiving and compression tools: the free and open source 7-Zip, the heavyweight WinRAR, the old-school WinZip, and the lesser-known MagicRAR.

Hyper-Threading Comparison: Proprietary And ZIP

Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

7-Zip posts the largest performance gains from Hyper-Threading, reflecting optimizations for parallelization. Going from four to eight threads massively cuts down compression time. 7-Zip is 28 percent faster with its own 7z format, and 33 percent faster with the ubiquitous ZIP format. WinZip also benefits from from having Hyper-Threading enabled, while WinRAR posts smaller performance gains. MagicRAR is single-threaded, and consequently gets no benefit with Hyper-Threading turned on. In fact, it ends up being somewhat slower with the feature enabled.