GIMP Image Editing

Website: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)

Our GIMP image editing test simulates how well a PC can manipulate a collection of large digital photos, and to achieve a low time requires a PC with a powerful CPU, plenty of quick memory and efficient hard disk drive access.


The Intel board scores a six percent lead here over the Zotac which is quite a substantial 24 seconds.

Handbrake H.264 Encoding

Website: HandBrake
Our test uses Handbrake - an open-source, GPL-licensed, multi-platform, multi-threaded 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.


The gap is much closer in video encoding, with only a two percent gap and less than ten seconds apart over several minutes is not that significant.

File Compression & Encryption:

Website: WinRAR
File compression consists of using WinRAR 3.70 Multithreaded to compress and encrypt separately a single 276MB MPEG2 file and 400 3MP images. This test assesses the CPU, memory and hard drive performance.



The Intel and Zotac boards fritter back and forth here by a few seconds, but overall they are pretty much the same.

File Decompression & Decryption:

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted. This test focuses more on system hard drive performance than CPU and memory.



Again, the Intel board leads with better hard drive performance, in addition to CPU and memory performance.