Most of you may be considering buying the Inno3D ION iChiLL Edition motherboard in order to set up an HTPC system. So let's see how this platform performs with video playback, specially with the latest video formats/codecs and of course, at full HD resolution. Before using the device, it is advised to get the latest drivers of all the included components.

For testing video playback we used the latest K-Lite Codec with Media Player HomeCinema that enables hardware acceleration for almost any kind of content, powered by the Nvidia CUDA technology. The main idea is to off-load all the cpu usage to the GPU. Here are the results:

- DivXHD Playback

The cpu usage reached the ~30% which seems very good although our expectations were higher here. Probably this content cannot be hardware-accelerated.

- 720p MKV playback

Probably one of the most popular content format right now for TV-Shows, documentaries and of course movies. An MKV files at 1280x720 encoded with H264 technology will give you very high image quality at a small file size.

We play backed many video files using the Media player classic software. The CPU usage maxed at no more than 10%, which is impressive indeed:

- 1080p MKV playback

Passing to even higher resolution and encoding rates, we are ready to test the full HD resolution files such as those you will enjoy when watching a Blu-Ray movie. Playback was not a problem for our system. The CPU utilization merely reached the 13%.

Moving to more demanding scenarios, we decoded some 1080p Youtube video clips with the latest Adobe Flash 10.1 beta installed. The results are still very good, with the CPU load to reach the ~12%

or with another clip the 18%. In both cases the playback was very smooth without any sound/video interruptions:

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