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.


Adobe Photoshop performance is very good – faster than even the MSI P35 board by five seconds and significantly faster than the Abit IX38.

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.



On the other hand, the file compression tests were slightly slower for the Gigabyte compared to the MSI and while the Abit keeps up with large file compression it's consistently very much slower in small file compression.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



In decompression tests, again the Gigabyte is fractionally slower, but only by a very small amount.

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.


The Abit X38 finally pulls out a lead, but only by a couple of seconds over a several minute test where all the boards, including the Gigabyte, perform virtually the same.