Home Theatre PC Motherboard Shootout

HQV and HD HQV

Silicon Optix, makers of HQV and HD HQV, provides an industry standard benchmark for looking at video quality by providing tests the cover all areas of video processing playback: (motion adaptive) de-interlacing, noise reduction, 3:2 Pull-down detection (Inverse telecine), Film Cadence and Film Resolution manipulation.

The tests are scored out of 130 and 100 for the HQV and HD HQV tests respectively, where a score of 130 and 100 in each case is considered "perfect."

We set the output at 1080p to test the video processing of the chipset, as opposed to the display. While we left the "performance settings" on auto, we did adjust the de-interlacing settings to find the best solution available from the drivers.


As much as I rip into Intel for its below-par gaming performance, what it has done absolutely right is its video image quality. It delivers a perfect score in the HQV test, but it’s let down a bit in HD HQV testing. Comparatively the Intel G35 knocks the socks off both AMD's 690G and Nvidia's GeForce 7100. The Nvidia solution we can almost forgive – it has no PureVideo hardware built into this chipset, however AMD's Avivo performance was sporadic to say the least. Our first run through yielded a HQV score of 13, which was pretty pathetic.

No matter how much we changed and fiddled with the Catalyst Control Center or Cyberlink could not improve the score; nothing worked, no inverse telecine or deinterlacing. Reboot, disk out, disk in, recheck and try yet again... suddenly everything clicks in and works?! The flag in Catalyst Control Center still looks pretty horrible but PowerDVD Ultra seems to finally be in cahoots. At the second time of asking, we got a score of 83 which is very respectable, especially for hardware this old.

If you're looking for a quality output that doesn't require buying hoops just to jump through like AMD make you do, the Asus P5E-VM HDMI with the Intel G35 chipset is absolutely the one to get. The problem with HQV is that you need an almost ideal display like this to really appreciate what good output quality really looks like.