GIMP Image Editing

Website: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)


Image editing performance is really not that great as the Gigabyte 785G board languishes behind the competition by a dozen seconds. Even the older, DDR2 780G Asus board is a notable 13 seconds or three per cent faster. When overclocked and with the fourth core unlocked, the Gigabyte 785G is significantly faster by a notable 30 seconds, or 8.5 per cent.

Handbrake H.264 Encoding

Website: HandBrake

Our test uses HandBrake - an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows - to encode a high resolution MPEG-2 video using the H.264 codec. This primarily tests multi-threaded CPU and memory subsystem performance.


Again, the Asus board again creates a surprising lead here, despite the lack of memory bandwidth and the CPU being "natively" AM3, it clearly pushes out another 3.5 per cent performance advantage compared to the Gigabyte 785G. Of which, the Gigabyte is also marginally faster than the MSI (that again has more memory bandwidth) by just a couple of seconds too.

With the fourth core unlocked thanks to the Gigabyte's in built BIOS hack, the Gigabyte 785G board is, not surprisingly, significantly faster than the other boards that don't offer this feature. The unlocking is not guaranteed with every CPU, but it does make it a massive 20 per cent faster here.

Multitasking Performance

Website: MPC-HC
Website: 7-Zip


With multitasking it's usual to see more memory bandwidth benefiting, and that's exactly what we see here - the MSI board is a few seconds faster than the Gigabyte 785G on average, of which is a notable 11 seconds or five per cent faster than the DDR2 Asus 780G.

In our multitasking test the same difference isn't seen, with the MSI taking a strong lead thanks to its superior DDR3 bandwidth unhindered by an IGP. Because video is played during a file compression sequence in this test, the IGP hardware is loaded quite significantly, making a big dent on available memory bandwidth that still has to navigate the HT 3.0 link to the CPU, then wait for memory access.