Intel Core 2 Duo E4300

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.

In Photoshop Elements, both the Core 2 Duo E4300 and E6300 processors were slower than the similarly priced Athlon 64 X2 4200+. The E4300 was quite a bit slower, but the E6300 and X2 4200+ were fairly evenly matched here. AMD's Athlon 64 X2 3800+ was just over ten seconds slower than the E4300, but it's quite a bit cheaper.

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.

The tables were turned in quite emphatic fashion in our Xvid encoding test - the E4300 was almost two minutes faster than the X2 4200+, while the E6300 was another 50 seconds faster than the E4300.