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 Gigabyte performance is excellent, on average exceeding every other board by a significant margin.

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 large file compression is excellent, especially so compared to the MSI board which also features the same 2GB of memory and an AMD Athlon X2 5000+ CPU. The Asus board still performs a little better, but the Gigabyte 780G still delivers an excellent result. Small file compression tells a similar story, but to a lesser degree.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Decompression of large and small files is consistently excellent and faster than the competition. This test puts more emphasis on the SATA drive performance so it's good to see AMD has genuinely improved itself.

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.


Again, the Gigabyte 780G performs better than the identically specced MSI board and while it may not be the fastest; its performance is still very good.