Best procssor for Winrar / Zip software.

[chavo]

Hi,

I am looking at a new PC bulid and was wondering, which chip is the fastest at unzipping large packages say 5gig plus? also Paring files using quickpar.

should i be looking for chips with hi clock speeds or multi core? large L3 caches or anything else?


Thanks

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What is your budget??

WinZIP is single threaded,WinRAR is lightly threaded(uses two threads AFAIK) and 7-zip is multi-threaded.

[badass]

For WinRAR, IIRC, An AMD quad core is the best. Possibly even Bulldozer based.
I've not seen 7-Zip use more than 2 cores. WinRAR definitely uses all cores on my quad core but the scaling beyond 4 cores is low at best. I've no idea about quickpar.
Having seen a few reviews, the AMD processors generally do well in archiving.

[chavo]

It's actually for a friend. It's a media center and zipping and unzipping movies is what he does a lot off. I think processor speed would be more important than multi cores, more ghz the better what do u lot think?

[g8ina]

The unzipper will be fast enough compared to how long Quickpar takes !

But IIRC memory is more of an issue than CPU power with these, it certainly sped up considerably when I (doing exactly the same thing) upgraded my RAM.

[shaithis]

Disk speed is probably going to be the limiting factor more then CPU. QuickPar is the slowest by a mile and uses 1 core. You can run multiple sessions of it concurrently though and therefore do multiple jobs at once but you will hit disk contention issues pretty fast.

[DanceswithUnix]

Benchies for 7zip & 2par are halfway down this page:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7

They usually bench with SSD drives though, so you might now see that kind of performance.

TBH, for a media centre PC I think I power usage might be more important. For starters, most media PCs are micro-ATX motherboard and for AMD most of those won't take a high end CPU as they have a 95W limit. I think that is why many these days go Llano or I3.

[Jay]

I would think the AMD x6 CPUs may be best for this

[kalniel]

Get an AMD graphics card in the new year and do it on the GPU

[watercooled]

The original LZMA algorithm on 7zip is limited to 2 threads, LZMA2 uses all available threads.

I'm not sure why you'd want to put movies in a compressed archive since they're compressed anyway (will give a very poor compression ratio), unless you're splitting into parts for transmitting, but then you can do that without compression.

Do NOT compare CPUs based on frequency alone - PC world may rave about it but it's completely irrelevant except between exactly the same CPU core, for example Core i5 750 and Core i5 760 can be compared but the Core i5 650 can not because it uses a different die. The same goes for cache sizes. I can find plenty of examples if you wish.

Phenom II X6 CPUs are dirt cheap now so excellent value for money. Just check the motherboard can handle 95/125w CPUs, depending on the chip.

Edit: I almost forgot, you can get multithreaded Par2 software now: http://chuchusoft.com/par2_tbb/index.html

[scaryjim]

Get an AMD graphics card in the new year and do it on the GPU

Cool, is that the first major software win for AMD's Fusion APUs then? How do Intel's IGPs perform with OpenCL workloads? Can they, even?

Makes an A-series APU look even more tempting, tbh...

[watercooled]

Intel's current IGPs do not support OpenCL.

[kalniel]

Cool, is that the first major software win for AMD's Fusion APUs then? How do Intel's IGPs perform with OpenCL workloads? Can they, even?

Makes an A-series APU look even more tempting, tbh...

Well I think it's primarily a win for openCL, so will work on nVidia pretty well and even a limited amount on Intel if they get their drivers sorted. But the low-latency/high bandwidth access to shared RAM might make the A-series a tempting proposition if that's more limiting than GPU power.

The new GPU architecture (GCN) is being billed by AMD as enabling the fusion system architecture - future piledriver+7000 series APUs could be very interesting indeed - we knew bulldozer had a vector weakness, these new GPUs should plug that very nicely.