Paint.NET x64

Website: Paint.NET

This is the 64-bit version of the popular free image editing software, Paint.NET. It's not as advanced as something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but it does serve well for most image editing tasks.

We used the PDNBench script to test the processing times for a range of images and filters. The multi-threaded software also takes advantage of multi-core processors quite effectively.

For more information on what the benchmark script entails, please see this thread on the Paint.NET forums.


Both boards perform identically, the new MSI Eclipse SLI 123 BIOS doesn't make a lick of difference between it and the Asus P6T Deluxe.

GIMP Image Editing

Website: GUN 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.


Like above, both the MSI and Asus perform the same in the GIMP image editing test - there's not a whisker between them.

AutoMKV x.264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x.264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.97.1 to compress a 1.1GB DVD VOB file into 350MB MP4 file using a two-pass encode and we used a 112kbps LAME encoder to compress the audio. The whole process is dependent on both single and multi-core performance and the entire encoding time was recorded.

There's quite a shift to using MKV or MP4 wrappers for x264 content now, especially for movie content and those in the large anime fansubbing community. x264 doesn't have the same SSE enhancements as some other codecs, but the benefits of extra cache and better memory performance should still show notable improvements.


The MSI is actually a few seconds faster in x.264 encoding, despite the slight favour for the Asus in memory performance, although there's not much between both boards and four seconds over several minutes is not very noticeable in the real world.

Handbrake H.264 Encoding

Website: HandBrake
Our test uses Handbrake - an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded 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.


Yet again the performance between the boards is evenly matched and both perform identically.