Paint.NET x64

Website: Paint.NET

This is the 64-bit version of the popular free image editing software, Paint.NET. It's not as advanced as something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but it does serve well for most image editing tasks.

We used the PDNBench script to test the processing times for a range of images and filters. The multi-threaded software also takes advantage of multi-core processors quite effectively.

For more information on what the benchmark script entails, please see this thread on the Paint.NET forums.






Paint.NET is highly threaded and so the 9350e fits exactly where we'd expect - right above the dual-cores and triple-core, but below every other quad-core we've tested. There is an exception to the rule though - the Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 at 3.16GHz still outperforms it. For a change we see CnQ not making much of a difference as the rendering time drops less than half a second.

File Compression & Encryption:

Website: WinRAR

Our file compression 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.



In file compression we again see the complete lack of clock speed not helping the 9350e in this test. CnQ also kills the performance - making a bigger hit than there is time difference between most of the table, especially in small file compression where we expect the cores to be constantly flicking from high to low clock speeds as the data is compressed, written to hard drive, then the next file is accessed ready for the process to be repeated. In comparison, a single large file will constantly load the CPU and keep the clock speed at its elevated value.