MSI P6N SLI Platinum

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP 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.


There is an SLI overhead of nearly 20 seconds and the board scores average at best. It a second or so slower than the more expensive EVGA nForce 680i LT SLI but still beats the Inno3D 680i SLI. The Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus with the same northbridge is also a fraction faster than the MSI P6N SLI Platinum.

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.


Performance in large file compression is better than average, out performing every other board apart from the Asus, but small file compression performance drops to around average in comparison.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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


Decompression on the MSI board is exceptionally good. Despite only using the old nForce 430 MCP southbridge, it still out performs the more expensive boards with newer MCP southbridges.