Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 three Mega Pixel photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

File Compression & Encryption:

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt the MPEG-2 source file from our video encoding test with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.


The X38 does appear a little faster in large file compression but overall the difference between chipsets on their own is quite literally nothing. As the Asus X38 Deluxe now accepts the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 natively with the latest BIOS update, is there actually any reason for X48? It's supposed to be better at the high end, which is great if you're the 0.01 percent of the population that is eyeing up the latest 1,800-2,000MHz DDR3 memory for your next purchase. But for everyone else it's just simply numbers that won't apply to any system they're likely to see so we didn't run them. Other than that, by the time X48 is here, X38 boards will be cheaper, have very mature BIOS revisions and will do 99 percent of what an X48 will.

Initial Thoughts

By the looks of things, it seems as though the X48 is likely just a speed binned X38 that will do a little bit more. Great if you're a fan of liquid nitrogen or dry ice, so prepare for more non-real world "overclocking records" to be broken and more 3DMark e-peen to be waved about from benchmarketing departments worldwide.

It's not like 1,600MHz FSB CPUs will be saved for X48 either, since Asus has already added support on its X38 boards. If Asus can manage this, we have no doubt that everyone else will follow suit too, which in turn kills any potential hardware leverage the X48 might have had.

On the overclocking front, Asus has shown me that it has achieved 568MHz FSB with an E6550 on air with a moderate voltage increase, however the team behind that must have a gem of a CPU because I can only get our QX9770 processor to match the results we got with our P5E3 Deluxe, which topped out around 500MHz FSB.

If you've already bought an X38 then don't stress about X48 - you're already there, just keep your BIOS up to date. However what worries me is that since X38 is hardly the performance demon what we expected it to be over P35 - where does this leave Intel's mid-to-high end chipset business?