Intel Core i5-760 and ECS P55H-AK Review

Media Playback (GPU)

Blu-Ray 3D Playback: Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 3D  is encoded in High Definition 1080p format using MPEG4 AVC compression and comes on a dual layer (50GB) disc. The aspect ratio of 2.35:1 is used with letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the 16:9 image. This portion of the movie has an average video bitrate of around 45MBPS and regularly peaks above this making it one of the most demanding Blu-Rays on the market. For comparison, a movie such as Casino Royale has a bitrate of 24MBPS.

MKV Playback: Our test file was a 1080p .mkv file which was taken from a 1080p source and converted into this format.

Blu-Ray playback is a relatively simple affair on ATI hardware, just install the latest drivers then tweak the display settings to the preferred level and then run PowerDVD 10 which features support for Blu-Ray 3D.

MKV playback works in a similar way now that PowerDVD 10 features GPU acceleration for this format and like Blu-Ray playback, as long as Avivo is enabled in the PowerDVD options, we get the benefits of GPU acceleration.

With the Avivo acceleration in place the CPU usage statistic is on average less than 2% for MKV. Blu-Ray 3D isn’t quite as low but with a maximum of 15.6% CPU use there are still plenty of resources free for other tasks.

For further information on Blu-Ray 3D playback see our launch article here.