1080p Playback

Because several users on our forums asked for it, we have also tested this board to find out how well it can handle 1080p high-definition content.

1080p is currently the best quality available for consumer content, with every single frame coming in a resolution of 1920x1080 or exactly 2,073,600 pixels.

For our testing we used the MP4 trailer of Disney's The Greatest Game. The trailer contains some very fast scenes that are among the most demanding of all HD videos we could find.

For testing we tried with a single core 3000+ and a dual core 5000+ processor. We measured CPU load via task manager while the playback was running in Media Player Classic. The onboard Radeon graphics solution was used to displaying the video.

Since a stock 3000+ isn't gonna do it we overclocked the CPU clock to 240 MHz, which resulted in a 2160 MHz clock speed.

As you can see there are still some phases where the CPU load reaches 100%.

Next on is the 3000+ running at 260 MHz clock, which is 2340 MHz.

Only a few very short peaks at 100% are visible. At this setting the video playback is completely smooth.

The last test is the 3000+ at 275 MHz (= 2475 MHz)

Here you can see perfectly smooth video playback, yet the CPU load sometimes still goes close to 100%.

With a Dual Core Athlon64 X2 we got the following results. Please note that this time we started at the CPU's default clock of 2600 MHz and reduced the multiplier downward to simulate less powerful processors.

Perfect playback, even though the CPU load on one core reaches 100% once. The other core is completely idle though.


We can see several peaks completely loading one core, but playback is still fine.


At 2200 MHz playback sometimes hangs and gets jerky.

Another thing that we noticed during testing is that you definitely want to run at DDR2-800, at the very least DDR2-667. At 400 MHz memory clock, even the X2 5000+ couldn't play the movie back without lags because playback was crippled by memory performance.

Our suggestion for smooth 1080p playback would be at least an Athlon64 3800+ processor, better a 4000+. Since our player/codec is single threaded there is no benefit from going dual core in this case. This may change with different codecs/players.