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.






The largely CPU dominated Paint.NET was fractionally faster on the MSI board than the other P45 boards, but with just half a second splitting the field it's not a hugely advantageous result.

AutoMKV x264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.95c and 64-bit x264 encoder 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 x264 video encoding result was very good however—even despite the lack of memory performance—with the MSI P45 Platinum only delivering an encode time two seconds slower than the Gigabyte P45 board. Comparatively it was some five seconds ahead of the Asus P5Q Deluxe and that's a good result, but how much of a real world performance advantage is five seconds in a 13 minute test?