BluRay Testing

The silent cooling and the built in HD playback support make the PowerColor HD4650 ideal for a HTPC build.  As with all of our mid-market HD cards, we are going to focus on testing the Blu-Ray playback.  My test system was built for gaming and should offer more than enough support for the HD4650 so any shortcomings should be easy to identify as a video issue.

BluRay movies typically are encoded in one of two codecs; VC-1 and MPEG-4, also known as H.264.  Occasionally, you will see a movie in MPEG-2 as well.  Because of this, we are going to test one movie encoded with each codec, all at 1080p.  For the VC-1 test, we are going to use: V for Vendetta.  For the MPEG-4 test, we will use the movie X-Men 3: The Last Stand.  For MPEG-2, we will use Black Hawk Down.  To determine performance, we will look at CPU usage during playback, and watch for any dropped frames. These same movies have been used in several of our HD tests for ease of comparison.

All playback testing was done with Cyberlink's PowerDVD 9 in full screen mode.

VC-1:

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First the VC-1 testing with V for Vendetta.  Our Q6600 easily havdled the playback with an average CPU Usage of under 20% throughout the playback.  Out of all the testing V ran with the highest load and this load was not as pronounced in our second VC-1 sample 300.  Some might consider the Q6600 overkill for a HTPC but as prices continue to drop a passively cooled quad gives your HTPC added versatility.

MPEG-4 (H.264):

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Next up is our MPEG-4 title, X-Men 3: The Last Stand.  With the test system in full swing I was plesantly surprised to see the CPU load nearly off the bottom of the charts.  In previous tests, the MPEG-4 required a bit more CPU power to function.  With the HD4650 and our test system, MPEG-4 barely raises a sweat. 

MPEG-2:

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Finally, we have our MPEG-2 test.  For this, we used Black Hawk Down.  As with previous testing CPU performance is pretty close to that of MPEG-4.  Our test system ran with no noticeable effort on both the card and the CPU. 

In all tests it is safe to say the SCS3 HD4650 is more than capable of silently handling HD playback without any unnecessary stress on the system.  Despite our initial stumble with V for Vendetta, all of the tested playback was flawless and sound was delivered in clean 7.1 via an ATI adapter from another lab card. 

Packaging and Layout Features and Specs HD Playback Tests Gaming Performance Overclocking and Conclusion