WinRar and Sandra 2009

SiSoft's Sandra has become a mainstay in checking system performance while WinRar is a commonly used archiving tool. With Sandra 2009, I will be testing the memory bandwidth and latency while with WinRar I'll test the system's theoretical compression speed to provide another real-world test.

The Sandra ALU/FPU tests favor Intel's SMP core, and the latency test favors Intel's fast DDR3 integrated memory controller. Fast memory access used to be AMD's pride and joy but it looks like times have changed until AMD moves to DDR3 with AM3. WinRAR once again repeats what we already know. The single-threaded results, however, are slightly disturbing compared to previous performance differences.