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 EP45-DS3R is the slightest nose ahead of the Asus P5Q Deluxe here on average, and it's also 20ms faster than the DQ6 model and 50ms faster than the older P35 generation Gigabyte boards. There's very little in it from top to bottom on this table though - Paint.NET is mostly concerned with CPU performance (and core count) as well as memory bandwidth and efficiency.

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.


Considering Paint.NET and the other results on the next page are very good for the DS3R, we couldn't understand why the performance of the x264 encode was quite poor. We re-ran the test a couple of times and double checked the settings yet the performance was within a few seconds every time - it just seems to consistently perform at least 5-10 seconds behind the leading P45 boards.