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.





We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, image manipulation programs like Paint.NET love cores and it’s therefore no surprise to see the Phenom X3 8750 not match the similarly clocked X4 9750. The 8750 ends up being around 30 percent slower, which is a little more than we would have expected and it means it falls behind the cheaper Intel Core 2 Duo E6850. However, the higher-than-expected performance drop is probably down to the fact that the application isn’t optimised for triple-core processors yet.

File Compression & Encryption:

Website: WinRAR

Our file compression 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.



With our file compression tests, we found that the extra core on the Phenom X4 9750 made a difference in the large file test scenario, but it made almost no difference with the small file test scenario. We found this particularly interesting, because it’s clear that there are advantages for more cores in WinRAR, but just not in all file compression scenarios.