Test: WinRAR, WinZip or 7Zip, which is the King of compression?

Very regularly, whether for professional or private purposes, leads to create and manipulate compressed files. In this field, WinRAR, Winzip and 7Zip are the three most commonly used software and by far the most popular. But which choose if the goal is to compress the best and as quickly as possible? Response in our test!

In our life of surfer, geek or simple PC user, are all us to use more or less frequently with compressed files. There is nothing new and older will remember with nostalgia the games archived on diskette in "ARJ". The goal is always the same: reducing the size of the files or simply sometimes grouped as a single file, a multitude of many small files. This type of tool has during many years been shunned by Microsoft but since Windows XP, it is an integral part of the operating system, basic version nevertheless.

On the market, there are many products can compress and decompress files. Some are free, others are paying or are available in unlimited use as WinRAR shareware version. In preparation for this article, we have sought to enter this comparison software and we must confess that with this offer including many exotic software or which are more updated as WinACE, we have chosen to restrict ourselves to the three lights in the field software: WinRAR, WinZip and finally 7Zip.

After a short presentation of each product, we will go to the heart of the matter, namely practical tests. At this level, we conducted three types of test:

Compression of 3 text files comprising each of the millions of rows and therefore in principle with a propensity to compression. It is what is commonly called flat files that we obtained from a large company and of its information system. They weigh 3.27 GB, mean that they contain significant amount of data.A Blu - Ray disc compression. This choice is representative of a large amount of data to deal with a potential for lower than a text file compression.Compression of many various files including Office, small videos, images, and pdf files, etc.

The configuration used for these tests in compression is as follows:

Card mother Asus Rampage III GeneCore i7 980 X 6 hearts + Hyper-Threading3x2 GB memory A-Data DDR3-1600SSD Crucial C300 disk systèmeSSD Intel 160 GB disk source for the OCZ Vertex EX 128 GB disk compressionsSSD target for the compressionsWindows 7 64 - bit (compression software have been installed in 64-bit version when they are available)

We also used a netbook Samsung NF 310 for certain cuts. It is equipped with a processor Intel Atom N550 dual core + Hyper-Threading and 2 GB of memory. It works under Windows 7 Starter 32-bit.