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 Abit IX38 QuadGT is more than a couple of seconds slower than the Asus Maximus Formlua, but still faster than the DDR3-based Gigabyte GA-X38T-DQ6. However, the Abit IP35 Pro, based on the older P35 chipset is still faster than all the X38 boards that we've tested.

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.



Small file compression is quite good on the IX38 QuadGT, but it's still slower than both the IP35 Pro and Maximus Formula. Unfortunately, large file compression is particularly poor, taking on average some 20-30 seconds longer than every other board tested.