Paint.NET x64

Website: Paint.NET

This is the 64-bit version of the popular free image editing software, Paint.NET. It's not as advanced as something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but it does serve well for most image editing tasks.

We used the PDNBench script to test the processing times for a range of images and filters. The multi-threaded software also takes advantage of multi-core processors quite effectively.

For more information on what the benchmark script entails, please see this thread on the Paint.NET forums.




Paint.NET is responsive to both memory bandwidth and CPU speed, so it doesn't surprise us when we see the two G.Skill kits with the combination fastest memory and CPU speed (3.4GHz) top the table. The 1,600MHz low latency GT1s nose ahead of the overclocked Corsairs, which are also lower down the table for low latency and stock 1,600MHz. The Pi coming out top on average is slightly surprising though considering the slightly higher latency, however it's only a fractional performance increase of less than half a second.


There's virtually no difference in this table, but again the notable difference is that the G.Skill Pi noses slightly ahead again and the overclocked Corsair is the slightest fraction faster than the rest of the pack.

AutoMKV x264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.95c and 64-bit x264 encoder to compress a 1.1GB DVD VOB file into 350MB MP4 file using a two-pass encode and we used a 112kbps LAME encoder to compress the audio. The whole process is dependent on both single and multi-core performance and the entire encoding time was recorded.

There's quite a shift to using MKV or MP4 wrappers for x264 content now, especially for movie content and those in the large anime fansubbing community. x264 doesn't have the same SSE enhancements as some other codecs, but the benefits of extra cache and better memory performance should still show notable improvements.


The heavily overclocked memory leads the pack - the G.Skill GT1s are comfortably ahead with the better combination of improved CAS latency, memory performance and CPU speed and the G.Skill Pis are not far behind with a similar clock speed but higher C9 latency. The overclocked Corsair is almost 30 seconds slower as it drops the memory and CPU speed a fraction - in fact the performance is very close to the GT1s at 1,800MHz and a lower C8.

Regardless of latency at 1,600MHz though there seems to be very little difference between all the DIMMs tested.


Again the Pis nose out ahead by several seconds over the fractionally higher clocked Corsair, but both are still an improvement over the slower and more expensive GT1s. Below this the rest of the pack performance almost identically at 1,600MHz, with the Corsair at C9 just dropping by a couple of seconds, however it's only two seconds off the more expensive and lower latency C7 G.Skill Pi here.