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.



The MSI K9A2 CF is still faster than the Asus in both cases but significantly slower, on average, than the Gigabyte in small file compression. So while the 790X seems to have certain improvements, it doesn't appear quite as good as the 790FX (but it is also £100 cheaper).

File Decompression & Decryption:

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



While the MSI K9A2 CF has good performance in our large file decompression test, but again, it can't keep up with the Gigabyte 790FX in the small file manipulation scenario.

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.


The MSI K9A2 CF is actually slightly faster than the Gigabyte for a change, but only marginally so, and both slightly lose out to the Asus board. All in all, the difference across the board is very negligible.