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.


Unsurprisingly, there is no real difference in Paint.NET and the Samsung HCF0 ICs do not generate any extra performance. Overall, it doesn't really make a difference either way unless the CPU clock speed is increased - like with the overclocked memory score.

GIMP Image Editing

Website: GUN Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)

Our GIMP image editing test simulates how well a PC can manipulate a collection of large digital photos, and to achieve a low time requires a PC with a powerful CPU, plenty of quick memory and efficient hard disk drive access.


There's not that much difference overall, but the G.Skill memory affords less of a difference between C8 and C9 than the Corsair, although the low latency result takes a bit of a backwards step. In comparison, the combination of higher memory, CPU and memory controller clock speed delivers quite an advantage for the overclocked G.Skill result.

Handbrake H.264 Encoding

Website: HandBrake
Our test uses Handbrake - an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows - to encode a high resolution MPEG-2 video using the H.264 codec. This primarily tests multi-threaded CPU and memory subsystem performance.


However, the overclocked G.Skill makes no advantage here and all the results are pretty much identical in our video encoding test.