Corsair Dominator 9136C5D & 10000C5DF

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.

As expected, the progressively faster memory provides a progressively better performance, although at most this is only a couple of seconds when looking across the same 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.

Generally, the performance increase is several seconds as the memory speed increases on every board, however there is the odd occasion where things go a little backwards like on the Inno3D in large file compression and the DFI on small file compression. The Asus remains the consistent performer, faster than the others throughout.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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

There are some surprising differences here in large decompression and decryption which is also largely dependent on hard drive speed: from top to bottom we're seeing nearly a 30% increase in speed from the DFI down to the Inno3D. Small File Decompression is more dependent again on the hard drive as the write heads have to skip about more which means the extra memory bandwidth is overruled.

Overall we're not seeing a huge jump in encoding time. Obviously if you're waiting hours for super sized files to compress then you will see a noticeable reduction in time, but you have to balance that off between buying a simply faster motherboard, like the Asus Commando with slightly cheaper memory for exactly the same effect.