Here we performed a series of Video playback tests. We used an HDMI cable and connected the motherboard to an LG L246WH (24") TFT/LCD monitor. For all the playback tests we used the PowerDVD 8 Ultra v8.0.2021.50 software with the following settings:

The PowerDVD software automatically recognized the processor/IGP features and enabled Video acceleration playback.

First we used the HQV Benchmark DVD that is used from many companies to evaluate the visual quality of a graphic card/DVD player. Hopefully ATI has done good work and the results are very good:

A perfect overall score for this series of tests would be the 130. The ATI HD3300 scored an 113. The two sub-tests where the IGP gave a lower score was the e "Jaggies Patern 2" and the "the Film Cadance". In the first case the third bar of the test was displayed rather blurred and with some jaggies. The Film Cadance subtest also showed some jaggies on the screen. Thought in real life you will not notice these problems, we consider this performance as a very good one.

Passing to Blu-Ray playback things will become interesting. For our tests, we used the Casino Royal Blu-Ray title with the Sony BWU-100A PC drive. We used the PowerDVD 8 software and we monitored the CPU utilization and the general playback behavior. To our surprise, the CPU% usage was very low, down to 4% average, with some spikes reaching the 8%.

So the ATI HD3300 can easily deal with HD material.

Some remarks about the motherboard outputs:

• The DVI-D port does not support D-Sub connection with an adapter
• The HDMI audio output only supports AC3, DTS and 2-channel-LPCM
  formats (AC3 and DTS require the use of an external decoder for decoding.)
• In case you decide to perform Dual display, only the [DVI-D + D-Sub] and [HDMI + D-Sub] are supported