GIMP Image Editing

Website: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)


The MSI and Asus boards are evenly matched at stock speeds in image encoding, on average, and the extra base clock and core speed works for Asus' advantage when overclocked as it shaves a tidy nine seconds, or four per cent off the MSI performance.

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.


At stock speeds the MSI slithers ahead - it's mostly because of its memory bandwidth advantage, but the clock frequency helps the Asus board when overclocked as it claws back virtually the same advantage.

Multitasking Performance

Website: MPC-HC
Website: 7-Zip


The MSI clearly strikes a whopping ten per cent advantage when overclocked, although just slightly at stock speeds compared to the Asus.