Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3-Mega Pixel 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.


First, that's not a typo for the Abit IP35 Pro - we take an average of three results within the same range and it consistently performed around the 290 second mark with a pair of X1900s in CrossFire. Both the Abit and Asus outperform both Gigabyte boards here by 30 to 40 seconds which is a significant margin for both single and multi-GPU configurations.

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 DDR3-based Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 gives us the fastest result here in large file compression, but it's not that much faster than the IP35 Pro. The Asus board is around the same speed as the Gigabyte X38-DS5, but the whole field only has a spread of a couple of seconds. On the other hand, the small file compression test gives us a completely different result. The Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 is understandably quicker than the X38-DS5, but again the Asus and Abit boards outperform both Gigabyte boards consistently on average and do so by a significant margin.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



While less CPU and memory dependent, the results are almost the same as compression and encryption - the small file decompression and decryption is a several seconds slower for both Gigabyte boards, but they are just a couple of seconds faster at most when dealing with a single large file. It seems that the Gigabyte boards struggle a little when dealing with multiple files in quick succession with the current BIOS revisions - there's a bottleneck somewhere between CPU, memory and hard drive.