According to the CDIO requirements, implementation of theoretical knowledge in the textbook through experimental exercises is one of the most important teaching modality in the CDIO courses. [4] Taking Digital Image Processing course of Chengdu University of Information Technology as research target, there are two categories of experimental utilities: software and hardware. Three subjects (image enhancement, image compression and color image processing) of this course were implemented using matlab 7.1 and image processing hardware toolkit (designed specifically in High speed Image Processing Centre of Chengdu University of Information Technology) [3] Two groups of students from 3rd year undergraduate students are compared through questionnaire investigation about teaching effects and the academic scores tested as the quantitative evaluation. This study demonstrates how students benefit through using software and hardware utilities to implement CDIO experiments, and to find out what is the respective advantage for these two methods in order to make further improvement on teaching.