Sapphire PURE CrossFire PC-AM2RD580

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.


The Sapphire performs about as well as the ECS, save for a few seconds better in single card mode. Again, we see a slight negative effect when enabling CrossFire, which shows the "overhead" of multiple GPUs. Both RD580 boards are sligtly better performing than the Asus AM2 nForce 590 SLI board.

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.

In compression the Sapphire performs a few seconds faster than the ECS board but on average about the same as the Asus which had slightly faster memory timings.

We found that memory performance has quite a large effect in our compression tests here.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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

Decompression is dependent on harddisk write speed as well as CPU and memory, and the Sapphire performs as well as the ECS but drops a second to the Asus.