Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3-Mega Pixel 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.


The SSD performance is over a minute faster then a 7200RPM hard drive, but Photoshop is still nearly four times faster on the AMD BE-2350 system. The 5000+ 65nm is only 120 percent faster than the low power BE-2350 as well, and between 1GB and 2GB of memory (single versus dual channel) there is just 10 seconds difference.

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 SSD offers a greater performance by close to two minutes, but it's still four and a half times slower then the AMD system.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



The slower SSD speed means that it's up to 30 seconds slower in decompression testing than the EPIA EX with a 7200RPM hard drive. Again, the AMD systems are significantly faster but comparatively between them it's only by a few seconds.