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 MSI with its 2.6GHz Athlon 64 X2 5000+ CPU outperforms both Intel boards with 1.80GHz Core 2 Duo E4300 by around 20 seconds. There's only about 10 seconds between the Gigabyte and Asus boards though, with the Gigabyte edging ahead between the two.

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 boot is on the other foot now where the Asus P5E-VM HDMI board outperforms both the Gigabyte and MSI. On average it’s about 20-60 seconds ahead of the Gigabyte which has almost identical hardware, while both Intel boards are faster than the MSI AMD 690G board by a large margin.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Decompression results are very much the same, with the MSI board on average performing slightly better than both Asus and Gigabyte Intel boards.

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.


Again the Asus Intel board outperforms the Gigabyte by a good 60 seconds, and both Gigabyte and MSI perform much closer together despite having different CPU subsystems.