WinRAR, does it support full quad core, or just 2

Soldato
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Last few days I've been forced to do a lot of ''heavy compressions'' and winrar takes ages, even in multithreading mode, to pack, mainly clips and BIG ( really big) bmp files...

Took me an hour to compress my 4+ gig fraps folder into 2.5 gigs on my pentium D 4ghz.
Now I know this is only as fast as a 2ghz dore 2 duo, and that a core 2 duo @ 3.5 ghz or so would destroy my D, but I was thinking to go a step further, and get a full boost by getting a q6600 after the 22nd of july, would this effectively cut compression times in 4, my hdd is fast (raid0 7200.10) and got 4 gb of ram + 1gb readyboost sd card, and running windows vista x64...


Also often converting ''.ratdvd'' into mpeg and otehr way around, would this also be about 4 times faster? Does ratdvd also support quad cores?
 
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No its not the hdd, hdd light is only flashing ocne per 3 seconds when comrpessing stuff heavily, anyhow for the orginal question, does winrar support quadcore?
Any1?
 
Well i wouldnt think a quad would cut down compression time by 4 times if you moved to quad. And from benchmarks its not really worth quad for compressing.
 
depending what your're doing rar may not be the best compressor, look into the alternatives, it's always a tradeoff between speed/compression ratio and time spent compressing versus time spent decompressing. And indeed many compressors have settings within.

Consider taring up the data if it is many files, as bigger single files tend to compress better than many smaller files.

dual / 4 cores. consider splitting the data and running 2 or 4 compression processes, and then taring / compressing the 2 or 4 intermediate archives into 1 single archive.
 
To rar and unrar fast you need VERY fast hard drives to keep up with the cpu, around 3-5 in some form of raid will make things much faster. Quad is much better for rar work but it helps a huge amount to invest in high quality ram (no sloppy timings or speed)
 
bledd. said:
in money terms. you're better off getting normal pc and buying more hard drives

My case wont fit more as my current 6, regardless hdd speed is not an issue I think, when I pack stuff with best compression ratio, my cpu usage shoots up to 100%, and my hdd is onyl flashing one per 1/2 secs, wich means its hardly doing anything hard with the hdd... I agree my hdd speed is more of a prob on lower compress ratio's, but I'm using max, because my 1.36 TB on my hdds are really filled fast...

Ram speed is 867 mhz CAS 4 (now only 2 gigs unlike in my 1st post cos took my slower 2g ram into my server am2 machine), surley this is fast enough?

Regardless I still can't choose between c2d and c2q next month ( price drops) .

I'd love quad for supcom, futre proofing, being able to finally compress stuff while gaming, etc...
But on the other hand, the gain in single apps except supcom seems to be minimal, so unsure about that one.
 
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In my experience it depends on 'which way' you are going.

Unraring is almost entirely HD (or perhaps interface to) limited on modern systems. You can see this by checking cpu utilization when extracting.

Whereas compressing is still heavily cpu/memory limited
 
chaparral said:
What speed does your winrar builtin hardware test show ??


400 kb/sec less than in xp :mad: , just 550 iirc. My single core p4 even did better in xp than my dc does in vista.

Compressing is the problem yes.

Didnt try 7zip yet, will look into...


EDIT, with slackened timings & increased ram bandwith, it almost doubled (ok not doubled, increased by more than a half) the speed in vista, now im getting 889kb/sec, what i used to get on slow ram in xp, now in vista :D .
Hmm so ram is a massive factor, didnt know my speeds would increase that much by just running ram @ 867 mhz cas 4 instead of 533mhz @ cas 5.
Still, would a new cpu help a lot?
Woundering what ill get now in xp :D .
 
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snowdog said:
400 kb/sec less than in xp :mad: , just 550 iirc. My single core p4 even did better in xp than my dc does in vista.
My dual core C2D E6600 at 3200ghz is testing at 900 in vista 64bit with 2gb ram (about 32minutes to compress a 4.3gb movie)

I seen what difference it makes with my CPU at 3600 or 3700ghz later..
I can't shut down my system right now for a few hours to change the cpu settings as as am downloading a 500mb 64bit farcry patch very slowly (35kb) :(
 
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chaparral said:
My dual core C2D E6600 at 3200ghz is testing at 900 in vista 64bit with 2gb ram (about 32minutes to compress a 4.3gb movie)

I seen what difference it makes with my CPU at 3600 or 3700ghz later..
I can't shut down my system right now for a few hours to change the cpu settings as as am downloading a 500mb 64bit farcry patch very slowly (35kb) :(


I'm now getting 850-880 in vista as said in my above post, in xp I'll prolly get a lot more, try increasing ram speed yourself, both bandwith and timings, I got more than a 50% boost by running 2gb matched pair @ 867mhz cas4, instead of 4gb mixed modules @ 533 mhz cas5.
 
snowdog said:
I'm now getting 850-880 in vista as said in my above post, in xp I'll prolly get a lot more, try increasing ram speed yourself, both bandwith and timings, I got more than a 50% boost by running 2gb matched pair @ 867mhz cas4, instead of 4gb mixed modules @ 533 mhz cas5.
My ram was running at 4-4-4-12 C4 400/800mhz
I try overclocking my ram higher and see what scores i get...
 
hmm in Xp i get the same as in vista now, even a tiny bit worse, could it be that the 64 bits os is helping it a bit in vista :confused: ?
EDIT, meh im blind, or my short term memory is messed up, its faster than in vista lol, by almost 100kb.


Regardless, heres my xp score now:
PD 3.9 ghz, 2gb ram @ 867mhz cas4, intel 945 chipset.


 
disable your AV program, and go into the options for windows defender, and disable real-time scanning
 
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