The Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn

Results: Compression Apps

Once upon a time, we were able to get decent scaling out of WinRAR. Now the Core i7-3930K, -4770K, and -3770K all pile up on top of each other, trailed closely by the -2700K. FX-8350 and A10-5800K are the laggards.

7-Zip typically responds much better to the addition of cores, and we certainly see the Core i7-3930K’s six cores distance themselves from Core i7-2700K’s four, both chips  based on Sandy Bridge. Of course, Ivy Bridge and Haswell chip away at that advantage with greater IPC throughput. However, neither newer architecture is able to overcome the raw performance of Sandy Bridge-E. If you spent $500-something on a Core i7-3930K more than a year and a half ago, you’re still very happy with it today.

Our WinZip chart includes several results, since we first test using the CPU cores, and then follow that up by enabling OpenCL acceleration to offload some of the workload. Of course, we know from talks with Corel that the GPU only kicks in on files larger than 8 MB. Because our 1.3 GB archive is a mix of different sizes and types, only some of this benchmark is aided by turning on OpenCL.

The red CPU bar shows us that Core i7-4770K turns in the fastest result, outpacing the six-core -3930K (the assumption there is that WinZip doesn’t scale much beyond four cores, since the Sandy Bridge-E part also loses to Ivy and Sandy Bridge).

Adding OpenCL support brings down the time of all solutions by at least a few seconds, since we’re maintaining the same GeForce GTX Titan graphics card through our suite’s benchmark runs.