Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 three megapixel 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 Striker II performance is quite a few seconds faster than the other boards, which all perform around the same speed. However we found that for all of the boards in Vista Home Premium, we had to re-run tests more for this particular benchmark because it was more prone to sporadic results. So, despite the slight performance increase with the Striker II, it seems that in any given run it could well be slower – it's just on average that it turns out better.

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.



In compression testing both the Strikers are outperformed by the reference XFX nForce 780i SLI, which edges it by a few seconds. The Striker Extreme is a little faster than the more recent Striker II Formula, but on average less than a second which makes it well within experimental error. All the boards are faster than the Inno3D nForce 680i SLI by several seconds.