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.


Despite the lower memory bandwidth, Photoshop is almost 20 seconds faster on Bearlake.

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.



Compression and Encryption testing leads to sporadic results, where small file compression is faster by four seconds on the Asus P5K Deluxe, but large file compression is slower. This is in contrast to the slightly lower hard drive performance we would expect to be a more limiting factor in small file compression testing.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Again, the slightly lower hard drive and memory performance contradicts the results in real-world applications, where the Asus P5K Deluxe is faster in both large and small file decompression.