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.


We saw some small benefits as a result of going to quad-core in Photoshop Elements, but more interesting was the benefit of moving from a 1066MHz FSB to 1333MHz. Comparing the E6750 to the E6700, which both have the same clockspeed, we saw a 23 second reduction in processing time.

WinRAR - 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.



Our compression and encryption tests also showed some signs that there were some small benefits as a result of moving to quad-cores. The standout result here was the performance difference between the Core 2 Quad Q6600 and the Core 2 Duo E6600 - in round terms, there was a 15 percent performance improvement and the Q6600 was only just over one second slower than the Core 2 Extreme X6800.