Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger

PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

Faster than AMD? Check. Slower than the Core i7 920? Check. Costs under $200? Check. It's a shame that Intel didn't enable Hyper Threading on the Core i5 750, otherwise it would've really ruined most of the LGA-1366 lineup. The Core i7 860 is probably the best of both worlds unfortunately they are very hard to come by at this point.

The Core i7 870 is actually faster than the i7 975 here. I'll chalk that up to DDR3-1333 with some aggressive turboing.

WinRAR - Archive Creation

Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:

Large file compression is very well threaded and thus we see a real difference in performance between the HT enabled i7 920 and the i5 750 without Hyper Threading. The i7 870 however is within 5% of the i7 975, at 56% of the cost.