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.


Clearly the AMD Sempron has a better performance here and it takes out a nice lead of 55 percent over the dual-core Atom. The dual-core Atom is just under five percent faster than the single-core variant here, so not a huge lead for twice the TDP.

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.



Surprisingly the AMD's large file compression is extremely slow, with both single and dual-core Atom products outperforming it by some margin. The four threaded X27-D sees the most performance gain from WinRAR, stretching out a comfortable 36 percent lead over its single-core brother. In small file compression, the gap is just half this at 18 percent and the AMD board is back up faster than both Atom products again.

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



An extra core makes almost no difference to the Atom products with the performance almost identical in the decompression test.