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.

The Asus sees the biggest improvement at 10 seconds, from running the faster XMS2-10000 memory at a higher clock over that of the XMS2-9136. However, the other boards show merely a second or so improvement at best by increasing the memory speed with the XMS2-10000.

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.

Again we see an increase that's larger on the Asus than the DFI, between both boards using the same XMS2-10000 memory, and there is a good few seconds difference between the XMS2-9136 and XMS2-10000. This is also due to the fact the Asus is running a 300MHz FSB providing a 3.0GHz CPU in order to attain the 1200MHz memory speed. The slightly faster CPU provides a greater jump than simple memory bandwidth improvements alone.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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

With the increased dependence on the hard drive, again we see only a little average improvement in results.