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.


The Phenom II CPUs don't fair well in the highly threaded Paint.NET and while several seconds faster than the previous generation, barely even make a dent on the Intel CPUs, with only the dual cores sitting lower down the table. Clock to clock the performance is about a second better - or four percent - while the Phenom X4 9950 is about 19 percent slower than the fastest X4 940 CPU. In the same way though, the X4 940 is just over 11 percent slower than the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 with DDR2, which is also cheaper.

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.


The Phenom II performance is pretty much exactly where we'd expect it to be - the 940 is wedged between the Intel Q9550 DDR3 and DDR2 times (while matching the faster DDR3), and the 920 matches the Q9450. Again, raw core MHz rather than memory controller speed plays a more important role here as the clock to clock 2.6GHz Phenom II versus original Phenom is faster, but way off the pace of the 2.8 and 3.0GHz retail CPUs.

The performance improvement between generations of Phenoms is quite impressive though where clock to clock it's around five percent faster, but X4 940 versus X4 9950 there is an impressive 18 percent difference.