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.






The DFI’s performance is fractionally faster than the other boards and it is at least consistent with the other DDR3 boards and also the XFX nForce 780i SLI DDR2-based mobo.

AutoMKV x264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.90 and x264 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.


Again, we saw another very good result in this test – the DFI pips both XFX nForce boards to the post by a few seconds, but unfortunately it can't keep up with the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 motherboard, however that is running DDR3 memory at a much higher frequency. On the other hand, it does outperform the DDR3-based nForce 790i Ultra SLI as well.