GIMP Image Editing

Website: GNU 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.


The Intel board is faster here by a solid 20 seconds which is surprising considering they both have the same hardware inside. With a 2.5GHz Pentium Dual-Core E5200 inside, it's certainly up to the task of some image editing unlike an Atom.

Handbrake H.264 Encoding

Website: HandBrake
Our test uses Handbrake - an open-source, GPL-licensed, multi-platform, multi-threaded 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.


In video encoding the difference is about the same, but the percentage difference is less because it's a longer test. However, 18 to 20 seconds is still a notable difference of extra wait time.

File Compression & Encryption:

Website: WinRAR
File compression consists of using WinRAR 3.70 Multithreaded to compress and encrypt separately a single 276MB MPEG2 file and 400 3MP images. This test assesses the CPU, memory and hard drive performance.



Large file compression is good on average but small file compression drops and balances this out. This, along with the image compression test, tells us that Zotac's GeForce 9300 MCP might have a touch of SATA I/O inefficiency.

File Decompression & Decryption:

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted. This test focuses more on system hard drive performance than CPU and memory.



In decompression, again which is as much a hard drive as CPU-memory subsystem test, the Zotac is again a few seconds slower.