Blu-ray Disc Playback

For our Blu-ray playback testing, we used Cyberlink's PowerDVD 8 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 maximum CPU usage during this section of the film.



Just as we saw with the Zotac GeForce 9300 (MCP7a), the GeForce 9300 IGP proves to be extremely adept at Blu-ray playback with the CPU load a fraction of that seen on the Intel DG45FC. However, there was no slow down on either motherboard with both providing smooth playback.

We did notice however that the IGP heatsink on the Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX WiFi got extremely warm and using an external temperature sensor we recorded a surface temperature at the end of the heatsinks of 51°C. In the cool air of our test lab this didn't prove to be a problem but could well do in the confines of a small mini-ITX case, particularly if it's fanless.

h.264 High-Definition Playback

For h.264 playback we used Media Player Classic - Home Cinema Edition under the Enhanced Video Renderer filter option (guide here) which enabled use of the video accelerator inside today's IGPs just like PowerDVD. Unlike Cyberlink's solution though, MPC-HC is completely free.



In h.264 playback at 1080p the Zotac uses quite a bit more CPU grunt than Intel's G45, although they are pretty evenly matched for 720p load. It just goes to show drivers and playback software is important - both Casino Royale and our trailers tested here are h.264 encoded, yet both Intel and Nvidia strife back and forth in 1080p playback loads. Both are still easily capable of playing the files without dropping frames, but if you are particularly concerned with minute efficiency differences and potential heat/noise - there's no certain answer unfortunately.