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.


The EVGA nForce650i Ultra sits between the nForce 650i SLI MSI board as a fraction faster, but it's also a similar fraction slower than both the EVGA nForce 680i LT and even the Gigabyte P35 board. The differences are as good as unnoticeable however, although using an E6300 the difference between the Gigabyte P35 and EVGA nForce 650i Ultra is a slightly more pronounced 10 seconds.

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.



Using the E6300 it's slower again than the Gigabyte P35 board by a fair 15 to 20 second margin, however with an X6800 the performance difference is less pronounced. Large file compression is slightly slower than the other boards, and a good 10 seconds slower than the similar nForce 650i SLI board.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Decompression performs exceptionally well in comparison, outperforming the other boards in large file decompression and matching them in small file decompression. The E6300 time is also very good, virtually matching that of the Gigabyte P35 board.