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 MA790FX-DQ6 undercuts the older M2N32-SLI Deluxe by quite a decent margin, showing that a year can really make a noticeable performance difference.

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.



Again the MA790FX-DQ6 performance is far better than the M2N32-SLI Deluxe, and by a very significant margin in small file compression.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Decompression the MA790FX-DQ6 is a bit slower for large files but the small file test shows the DQ6 in a far better light.

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.


Finally, the MA790FX-DQ6 actually turns out slightly slower in video encoding by several seconds, however it is worth remembering that this is over the course of a test that lasts for around 15 minutes.