In that box you can measure value of the performance of your computer.
There are two tests:
Benchmark shows rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). Rating value is calculated from measured speed and it is normalized with AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2 GHz, 512 KB L2) CPU in 64-bit Windows XP with multi-threading option switched off. So if you have Athlon 64, rating values must be close to real CPU frequency.
Compressing speed and rating strongly depend from memory (RAM) latency. Also you can change dictionary size to increase memory usage. If you enable Multi-threading option, 7-Zip will use two threads for compressing. It can speed up compressing speed up to 50-80% on Multi-Processor systems or up to 25% on Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading. Decompressing program always uses one thread, so Multi-threading option doesn't affect decompressing speed and rating.
Decompressing speed and rating strongly depend from integer part of CPU. For example, Intel Pentium 4 has big branch misprediction penalty (which is effect of long pipeline) and pretty slow multiply and shift operations. So Pentium 4 has pretty low decompressing ratings.
Total rating is average of the compressing and decompression ratings.
Also the program checks possible errors. So if Errors field shows more than 0 errors, it means that your hardware is bad. In most cases it means that your RAM is working with errors. In that case please don't use 7-Zip for compressing data, since such errors can lead to data losses.