Blu-ray Disc Playback

For our Blu-ray playback testing, we used PowerDVD Ultra with the standard settings enabled and audio was sent over HDMI to our test monitor. The Casino Royale BD-DVD is one of the most popular Blu-ray movies to date and it is a high bit-rate h.264 stream, which makes it ideal for testing CPU usage.

We used five minutes of playback during a high motion action section with lots of panning – we recorded the average and minimum CPU usage during this section of the film.



The performance drop is phenomenal – UVD works fantastically, but you do need to use appropriate software with the video acceleration option like Cyberlink PowerDVD. None of the previous machines could play back full-HD 1080p content (only the Intel is rated to though, and that's with MPEG-2 only), so for the first time we have an inexpensive, integrated system that's completely capable of even very high bitrate, HDCP encrypted, h.264 playback.

We even tested a lower power (and lower clocked) AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 processor, and comparatively that sat at just 37.3 percent average and 29.2 percent minimum CPU load at full-HD 1080p – an excellent result for a £55 CPU.

HD DVD Disc Playback

For HD DVD playback performance, we used PowerDVD Ultra again with the same configuration – standard software settings enabled and audio sent via HDMI. This time, we used V for Vendetta HD DVD, which is a medium bitrate disc authored using the VC-1 codec.

Again, we used five minutes of playback during a high motion action section with lots of panning – we recorded the average and minimum CPU usage during this section of the film.



For those with HD DVD drives, the VC-1 playback is equally as capable and even though the other systems could also play back the same movie this time, the AMD 780G performance is leaps and bounds above the rest.