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 Gigabyte Atom board is about 20 percent faster than the VIA EPIA, at only 100MHz increment in CPU speed that's a significant difference in favour of the Atom. However, compared to a more common dual-core CPU that takes typically between 300-500 seconds, over 1,500 is considerably slower.

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.



The file and small file compression on the Gigabyte Atom motherboard takes less than half the time compared to the VIA EPIA with C7 CPU - a significant increase in performance.

File Decompression & Decryption:

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted.



Again in decompression testing the Gigabyte Atom board is significantly faster in decompression tests too.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.


2,800 seconds is still 47 minutes to encode just 15 minutes of video. The Intel Atom (or VIA C7 for that matter) is simply not designed for video encoding so if you do want to use this for a HTPC with video recording, bear in mind that you'll need a separate compression processor or a full fat CPU to do the job because neither of these ultra low power "nettop" processors will cut it.