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.


The Zotac pips the Intel G45 board to the post here by a few seconds, and both are significantly faster than the equivalently clocked AMD boards.

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 Intel G45 board manages to eke out a huge average lead over the Zotac here. We retested to check it wasn't an anomalous result and we found both were consistent: the Zotac simply doesn't like large file file compression in WinRAR. With small file compression though the Intel board is still 20 seconds faster than the Zotac, however the Zotac does manage to extend a good 30 seconds lead over the AMD systems here.

The difference in memory performance is likely a large factor here between the Intel and Nvidia board as both have very good SATA performance and the single chip Nvidia MCP should technically be slightly less latency intensive than the chipset pair of Intel's G45 and ICH10.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Decompression is slightly faster on average with the Zotac board compared to the Intel G45 in both large and small file compression, but it's only about a second on both accounts - very little noticeable difference.

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.


Firstly, both the Intel CPUs are well ahead of the AMD's, as we'd expect, even in a clock to clock matching. The Intel G45 board is still significantly faster than the Zotac here too - by over 30 seconds on average, which is mostly due to its improved memory performance.