Paint.NET x64 3.05

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, we see nice scaling for the Phenoms and the performance is vastly better than the old Athlon 64 X2s, however it's also still quite a way behind the Intel quad-core CPUs, where the Q6600 at 2.4GHz is nearly 27 percent faster than the 2.6GHz Phenom.

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.



Again, we see some scaling between the Phenoms and the performance is largely higher than what's offered by the Athlon 64 X2s, however all the dual and quad-core Intel Core 2 chips from around the same price to the top of the range are still faster.