DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200 T2R/G

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.

Overall performance is pretty good, but a touch slower than the rest of the motherboards tested. Having extra CPU MHz over usable memory bandwidth has an advantage in this test as shown by the 11x266 versus 6x450 RD600 scores.

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.

Both usable memory bandwidth and CPU speed appear key here, and with the DFI lacking in one or the other it shows by dropping a fair few seconds compared to the other motherboard types overall.

File Decompression & Decryption:

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted.

Decompression is more reliant on CPU speed and hard disk write speed, which shows the DFI performs much closer to the other motherboards.