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.





Even in this short test, the quad-core processors are massively faster than the higher-clocked dual-core ones, while the extra cache seems to really help over and above memory bandwidth and front side bus. The QX9650 is around eight percent faster than the equally-clocked QX6850 - this is mostly due to the increased L2 cache size.

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 the QX9650 comes out on top and all the Intel Core 2 processors perform 25-50 seconds faster than even the fastest AMD 6400+. From the results, a combination of core quantity and front side bus bandwidth help in these tests but the QX9650 still out performs the same 3.0GHz/1,333MHz QX6850 by about six seconds.