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 is a fraction slower than the Asus P5Q Deluxe, on average, but it’s really nothing noticeable. Across the field there's very little difference, but it seems that all the Gigabyte boards tested don't like this predominantly CPU-weighted test very much.

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.


The x264 encoding performance is very positive, only coming in second to the faster DDR3 based X48T-DQ6 by just 10 seconds. Compared to the Asus P5Q Deluxe though, the EP45-DQ6 stretches out several seconds – that’s not particularly noticeable, but given the fact the Asus BIOS was very well-optimised at 3-3-3-9 and the Gigabyte was mostly left to Auto at 4-3-3-10, it's a very good result for the Gigabyte EP45-DQ6.