Asus P5NSLI

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

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

Image manipulation is understandably slower than other Conroe boards by between 10 and 30 seconds but still faster than the comparative nForce 570 SLI AM2 board with an FX62.

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.

We found that memory performance has quite a large effect in our compression tests here and clearly this is evident here with large compression test being nearly a third slower on the P5NSLI. It was even slower than MSI's K9N SLI nForce 570 SLI mobo with an Athlon 64 FX-62 installed.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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

Decompression doesn't really suffer as it's also dependent on hard disk write speed as well as CPU and memory speeds. Clearly the Asus SATA usage is as good as more expensive boards.