GIMP Image Editing

Website: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)


The Asus and MSI boards are evenly matched at stock speeds in image encoding, on average, and the extra base clock and core speed works for Asus' advantage when overclocked as it shaves a tidy nine seconds, or four per cent off the MSI performance.

Handbrake H.264 Encoding

Website: HandBrake

Our test uses HandBrake - an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded 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.


At stock speeds the MSI slivers ahead - mostly because of its memory bandwidth advantage, but the clock frequency helps the Asus board when overclocked as it claws back virtually the same advantage.

Multitasking Performance

Website: MPC-HC
Website: 7-Zip


Multi-tasking does not seem to favour the Asus board though, where the MSI clearly strikes nearly a ten per cent advantage when overclocked, and just slightly at stock speeds.