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.






There's barely anything between them, just half a second from top to bottom on average, but still the P5Q Deluxe comes out a joint-second.

AutoMKV x264 Encoding

Website: Doom9

We tested x264 compression using AutoMKV version 0.95c and 64-bit x264 encoder to compress a 1.1GB DVD VOB file into 350MB MP4 file using a two-pass encode and we used a 112kbps LAME encoder to compress the audio. The whole process is dependent on both single and multi-core performance and the entire encoding time was recorded.

There's quite a shift to using MKV or MP4 wrappers for x264 content now, especially for movie content and those in the large anime fansubbing community. x264 doesn't have the same SSE enhancements as some other codecs, but the benefits of extra cache and better memory performance should still show notable improvements.


Our video encoding benchmark seems to benefit more from DDR3 than specific DDR2 performance enhancements for the most part – the MSI P35 and Gigabyte X48 DDR3 boards come out on top here, with the Gigabyte stretching out a near 20 second lead (although for an extra £50 investment on the motherboard alone). The Asus P45 performs three seconds faster than the Abit IX38 QuadGT, and some fifteen seconds faster than the Gigabyte DDR2-based P35 board.