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 sees the Foxconn fall in just where we'd expect given the slightly lower synthetic memory bandwidth numbers - it's merely fractionally slower than the competition but there's not much between the whole field altogether.

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.


Video encoding on the Foxconn A79A-S is about 15 seconds slower than the Asus 790FX, some 30 seconds slower than the Asus CrossHair II and only a fraction faster than the more mainstream Gigabyte 790FX. Despite the fact the field is only split a small way over the long test, the Foxconn sits toward the lower end of its performance potential.