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.






The 64-bit version of Paint.NET is highly threaded, so the extra cores improve performance nearly twice as much. As for the difference between nForce 790i Ultra SLI and the other boards, well... there isn't any to put it simply.

AutoMKV x264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.90 and x264 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.


When using the QX9770 there's only five seconds difference in 16 minutes of encoding between the XFX 790i and Gigabyte X48 boards. The DDR3-based platforms do perform a little better than the DDR2 motherboards though: the XFX 780i is 10 to 15 seconds behind and the DFI LANParty X48-T2R is 30 seconds behind. Not exactly a huge amount by any means.

The difference is larger when it comes to the dual core setups; here the XFX 790i is, on average, the slowest by 20 seconds compared to the DDR2 boards and a much larger 60 seconds compared to the Gigabyte X48 board. It's still not exactly an epic amount in a 30 minute test, but it's still more than just a couple of seconds.