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 loves cores - the more the merrier. In this respect it's no wonder that the Intel quad-core Q6700 and Q6600 come out on top, but surprisingly the Phenom 9600 and 9500 aren't far behind and still outperform the far higher clocked Wolfdale CPUs. That said, when it comes to dual-core CPUs, the Wolfdale chips outperform everything else. For ~£130-£140 though, in a very multi-threaded application such as this, a Phenom 9600 is a better buy than say the E8400, however the E8400 will overclock considerably higher, nullifying the six second gap. But then again, the Q6600 is only £145, and that's five seconds faster again... and overclocks pretty well.

File Compression & Encryption:

Website: WinRAR

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.



While WinRAR 3.71 is multi-threaded, so the more cores the better, the Wolfdales scream through compression testing - more so in the large file use. The E8200 at 2.66GHz comes out on average faster than the E6850 at 3.0GHz by some five seconds. Even the E8500 and E8400 outperform the quad-core CPUs - the cache, memory bandwidth and clock speed making a difference more significant than two extra physical cores here.