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.


Again, AMD slowly edges up the graphs but Paint.NET is still largely an Intel dominated test, with slower clocked Core 2 CPUs affording a greater work efficiency than AMD's K10.5 core in the Phenom II. It's only a second or so off the Q9400, but it's 13 percent slower than the next jump to Q9550 and 45.5 percent slower than the massively threaded Core i7-920.

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.


On the other side of things for AMD, video encoding gave us a big surprise! The 955 is just 4.4 percent below the Core i7 920 here and it's nearly 7.2 percent faster than the more expensive Q9550. The greater memory bandwidth from an improved northbridge clock and DDR3 also benefit the video encoding too.