Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3-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.


Gigabyte has some great performance here, with 13 seconds being knocked off the Asus DDR3 board and some 16 seconds off the nForce 680i SLI DDR2 board.

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.



In large file compression there's very little between the DDR3 boards but in small file compression the Gigabyte again out performs both the DDR3 and DDR2 boards from current popular nForce 680i SLI and P35 chipsets.

File Decompression & Decryption:

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted.



Again the performance of the performance of the Gigabyte X38 board is very good, even though the synthetic SATA performance (not shown) is virtually identical to other boards we've seen using the same hard drive at 64.3MB/s. The small file decompression isn't quite as fast as the DDR2 680i SLI, but it still out performs the DDR3-based Asus P5K3 Deluxe.