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.


That's not a typo, the integrated graphics is actually that slow. It's abysmal in Photoshop, taking nearly two and a quarter times longer than using a dedicated graphics card. Even the integrated Intel G965 graphics on the AOpen XC Cube EU965 aren't anywhere near this bad. Thankfully using a dedicated (7600 GT) PCI-Express x16 card means the performance is only a fraction slower than the reference AMD FX-62 system with a 7900 GTX in it but they're still a little way off the performance of AOpen system.

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.



On platform performance, the more expensive AOpen XC Cube EU965 is actually slower in large file compression than the AMD FX-62 Shuttle SS21T with equivalent cards installed. Small file compression is the opposite however by a larger 15 to 20 second margin, which is quite a margin over just a two minute test. However the comparative AMD FX-62 system is only half this, at just 10 seconds faster.

There's a four second difference between integrated and discrete graphics in both cases, so a small investment can give you better performance as well as a better visual quality and extras like dual monitor support.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Again, the FX-62 Shuttle drops quite a bit of time to the AOpen SFF, even over such a short test, however it's still within a tolerable amount. Compared to the other, more expensive AMD FX-62 ATX system there is only a couple of seconds difference and that is likely attributed to the memory performance difference.

While everyone likes a faster system, having a dual core CPU and one process taking 30 seconds rather than 20 means most less intensive PC users just spend 10 seconds doing something else. The SS21T supported technology is still capable of doing multiple things at once.