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.



The Patriot Viper at its native speed of 1,800MHz C8, or just at 1,700MHz C8 on the Asus board, is close to the top of the table or at the top, ahead of the G.Skill GT1s that are rated to the same speed. The low latency performance of the Patriots is not that good though, but then again most of the 1,600MHz low latency modules are out performed by DDR2 at 1,066MHz C5. The Elixir memory is not bad when overclocked but since it cannot reduce its latencies much the "low latency" performance is not much better.

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.


Despite the overclocked Patriot Viper achieving a slightly lower overclock than the G.Skill memories, it's several seconds faster than the the Pi series but only two seconds slower than the GT1s. The Corsair that achieves the same 1,925MHz C9 overclock is actually 30 seconds slower. The inexpensive Elixir memory certainly doesn't have bad performance - it outperforms DDR2 by a few seconds at stock speeds and when tuned by as much as 10 to 20 seconds.


Again the Viper C8 performance tops the table, beating the other memories that even run slightly faster, although the maximum overclock at C9 sees the performance drop off quite considerably. The Elixir memory performance is generally uniform whether it's low latency or "C9" since there's not much difference between 9-9-9-27 and 9-8-8-24, however it does match the G.Skill Pi series, GT1 and Patriot performance that runs at 7-7-7.