MSI K9N SLI Platinum

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP 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 K9N SLI Platinum is a good 20 seconds faster than the nForce 590 SLI boards, but there quite a significant 40 second SLI overhead. Considering the nForce 570 SLI chipset doesn't offer the extra features that come with nForce 590 SLI, we think that this is pretty damn good going.

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.

Large and small file compression & encryption is again, faster than the nForce 590 SLI and ATI RD580 boards by a few seconds. We found that memory performance has quite a large effect in our compression tests here.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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

Decompression, however, is almost identical to the other NVIDIA chipset boards and still faster than the ECS KA3 MVP Extreme.