Abit KN9 SLI

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 Abit sets an impressive time comparable with the other boards tested and enabling SLI causes a similar overhead.

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.


Compression of large and small files is actually faster than all the other boards tested, including the more expensive NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI boards. It was only a few seconds slower than the reference Intel D975XBX mobo with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 installed.

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.


Large decompression is as fast or a a fraction faster than the rest tested. This test is a combined limitation of CPU and hard disk write speeds.