Foxconn N68S7AA nForce 680i SLI

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.

Whilst not the absolute fastest, the performance mirrors that of the other nForce boards, with the SLI overhead adding some 10 seconds to the encoding time.

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.

Although small compression performance is around par for the course, large compression performance is a slightly above average, only dropping a few seconds to the Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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

Large file decompression is only a second or so below average, but small file decompression is actually the fastest we've seen.