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.


Paint.NET is not quite under 10 seconds, but we're only 1.5 seconds shy. It's an impressive 50 percent faster than the stock Core i7 920, matching the level of the overclock. Compared to the best non-Core i7 CPU, the overclocked 920 is nearly twice as fast here.

AutoMKV x264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.97.1 and x264 to to compress a 1.1GB DVD VOB file into 350MB MP4 file using a two-pass encode and we used a 112kbps LAME encoder to compress the audio. The whole process is dependent on both single and multi-core performance and the entire encoding time was recorded.

There's quite a shift to using MKV or MP4 wrappers for x264 content now, especially for movie content and those in the large anime fansubbing community. x264 doesn't have the same SSE enhancements as DivX 6.8, but the benefits of extra cache and better memory performance should still show notable improvements.


The overclocked Core i7 920 leads with a healthy 16 percent performance improvement over the closest Core i7 965 and a huge 41 percent improvement over the original Core i7 920 clock - that should be a massive benefit to those who compress x.264 video and I expect the thought of cutting a multi-hour video encode in half is certainly appealing.