Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3-Mega Pixel photographs taken in a variety of surroundings and used 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.


Across the board the results are very close, with just a few seconds in it between top and bottom performers - a difference likely a result of the background services and "features" of Windows Vista, rather than actual motherboard differences.

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. Then, for the second test we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.



The XFX board with a single card consistently performed quite a few seconds in excess of the SLI setup and both the nForce 680i SLI and Abit IX38. Overall there's no consistent difference though, and certainly nothing that's truly noticeable.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Apart from the consistent anomaly from the nForce 680i SLI with single card during decoding, the nForce 780i SLI is consistently very fast in large file decompression. Small file use on the other hand has the same single card outperforming SLI again - while the former is very fast, the latter is the slowest result.

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.


Again, the single card nForce 780i SLI performs faster than the board in SLI - some 30 seconds so. Both nForce 780i SLI and 680i SLI perform respectively poorer in SLI mode, and the 780i is 20 seconds faster than the 680i in single card but about the same as the Abit IX38.