Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 three megapixel 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.


Photo manipulation is consistently superb, surprisingly so! It outperforms even more recent and more expensive motherboards.

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.



Large file compression seems to suffer but small file compression is actually very good again and the XPC manages to outperform a couple of other boards.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



Again the Shuttle SN68PTG5 suffers in large file handling but in small file decompression it's really not that bad.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.


Finally, during video encoding it clearly suffers from the lack of memory performance and adds just over a minute to the competitive times. This is a shame but understandable, but an HTPC will likely need to do some form of video encoding.