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.


Low latency DDR2 is the winner here, and not even the overclocked DDR3 being able to keep up with its low latencies. Readily available 1066MHz/PC2-8500 DDR2 is still faster than the more expensive DDR3 of the same frequency, however it does lose out when you move to frequencies above that. That's not to say other motherboards won't allow lower latency (4-4-4?) memory at 1066MHz.

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.



The comparative performance of DDR3 is again hobbled by its more lax latencies at 800MHz and 1066MHz. However, DDR3 does manage to keep up with (but not beat) DDR2-800MHz and 1066MHz when its running at 1333MHz and 1520MHz.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



It's the exact same story here, too. DDR3 requires very high clocks to keep up with the far lower latency DDR2 modules.