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.


Adobe Photoshop results don't actually fare too well on average. While the Gigabyte did churn out some mammoth performance in this test, the Sapphire performance is very similar to the nForce 590a and the AMD 790X boards that are generally much more affordable.

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 performance is again not bad – it’s better than the AMD 790X MSI results but not quite up to the seriously fast Gigabyte 790FX.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Again, we see slightly faster and certainly consistent performance from the Sapphire.

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.


The Sapphire outperforms the other boards in Xvid encoding—even the Gigabyte 790FX board—although not by much, only a few seconds over the several minute test.