The PDF Guide: File Size And Creation Time Tested

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Enthusiasts typically turn to hardware upgrades when it comes to improving the performance of their PC. In the case of PDF creation tools, you should consider looking at software first. We take Adobe Acrobat and compare it to several other viable options.

Test Setup And PDF Creation Settings

We used a Phenom II X6 1090T system with six processing cores to make sure that CPU performance doesn’t bottleneck the PDF creation process.

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
Performance Benchmarks
Motherboard (Socket AM3) Asus Crosshair IV Formula (Rev. 1.0), Chipset: AMD 890FX, BIOS: 0701 (04/02/2010)
CPU AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (45 nm, 3.2 GHz, 6 x 512 KB L2 and 6 MB L3 Cache, TDP 125 W, Rev. C3)
RAM 2 x 2 GB DDR3-1333 (OCZ3G2000LV4GK 8-8-8-24)
Graphics Sapphire Radeon HD 5850, GPU: Cypress (725 MHz), Graphics RAM: 1024 MB GDDR5 (2000 MHz), Stream Processors: 1440
Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 500 GB (ST3500320AS), 7200 RPM, SATA 3Gb/s, 32 MB Cache
Power Supply PC Power & Cooling, Silencer 750EPS12V, 750W
System Software and Drivers
Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate x64, Updated on 2010-03-03
Drivers and Settings
Intel Chipset Drivers Chipset Installation Utility Ver. 9.1.1.1025
Intel Storage Drivers Matrix Storage Drivers Ver. 8.​9.​0.​1023
Benchmark Files
Benchmark Details
Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Version: 2007 SP2 PPT to PDFPowerPoint Document 1:115 pages, bullets, text, tables, some images 3.54 MBPowerPoint Document 2: 24 pages, bullets, charts, lots of Smart Art 5.77 MB
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Header Cell - Column 0 Default Quality High Quality
Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard Standard High Quality Print
Foxit Phantom 2.0 Image Resolution 200 dpi Image Resolution 300 dpi
FreePDF 4.02 Medium Quality High Quality
PDFCreator 1.0.1 Normal High
Office PDF Minimum Standard