AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+

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 X2 6000+ managed to outperform its competitor, the Core 2 Duo E6700 by a single second. It's not the biggest of margins, but it's a promising start.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

Core 2's video encoding prowess soon puts the promising start on the back burner, with the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ only nine seconds faster than the E6400 - a chip that's clocked 866MHz slower. Yow.