Paint.NET x64

Website: Paint.NET

This is the 64-bit version of the popular free image editing software, Paint.NET. It's not as advanced as something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but it does serve well for most image editing tasks.

We used the PDNBench script to test the processing times for a range of images and filters. The multi-threaded software also takes advantage of multi-core processors quite effectively.

For more information on what the benchmark script entails, please see this thread on the Paint.NET forums.


Paint.NET is directly affected by cores and core frequency so naturally the faster Phenom II X4 940s stand out ahead here and the Intel Core 2s with their more efficient architecture and large L2 cache also perform considerably better still.

Comparatively, the 2.6GHz Phenom II X4 810 is about a second faster than the older 2.6GHz Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition. The 720 with its extra core noses ahead of the dual core, yet more expensive and higher clocked E8500 still, however the 2.6GHz 710 lags behind and again we see DDR3 stretching more of a lead over DDR2 at lower frequencies.

AutoMKV x264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.97.1 and x264 to to compress a 1.1GB DVD VOB file into 350MB MP4 file using a two-pass encode and we used a 112kbps LAME encoder to compress the audio. The whole process is dependent on both single and multi-core performance and the entire encoding time was recorded.

There's quite a shift to using MKV or MP4 wrappers for x264 content now, especially for movie content and those in the large anime fansubbing community. x264 doesn't have the same SSE enhancements as DivX 6.8, but the benefits of extra cache and better memory performance should still show notable improvements.


As is traditional for video encoding applications which are highly threaded, the quad-cores rule the roost here - the 810 and 805 are an improvement over the previous generation of Phenoms in a clock for clock comparison, and the triple-core Phenom II X3 720 also outperforms the faster clocked Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 too.