Results: Compression Apps
We’re sorting by the outcome of the CPU test, in red. There, the dual-core Pentium and dual-module Athlon, both overclocked, achieve a similar result slightly behind a much more expensive Core i3-4330.
When you push maximum compression using the –ez switch, AMD falters. Intel’s overclocked Pentium basically ties the Core i3, and both best the tweaked Athlon X4 750K by almost 15%.
Our OpenCL-accelerated test doesn’t punish AMD as severely as our Photoshop-based test did. Then again, work is only offloaded to the GeForce card when a file larger than 8 MB needs to be compressed, so the API isn’t in play throughout this benchmark.
Overclocking benefits both AMD and Intel, though the Pentium’s architecture appears better-suited to WinRAR right out of the gate. Even at 4.3 GHz, the Athlon X4 750K can’t match a stock Pentium G3258.
The tables turn in 7-Zip, where the overclocked Pentium cannot touch AMD’s stock Athlon X4 750K. 7-Zip is well-known to lean heavily on available cores/threads, and the more parallelized architectures leave Intel’s dual-core solution in the dust.
