HD Playback

To test the intended main function of the AN-M2HD I hooked it up via the included HDMI to DVI cable to my Dell 2407WFP. Then using media player classic, played a few different HD videos including various snippets from Microsoft's WMV HD showcase page (that can be found here) and the fantastic looking, slightly odd, open source film Elephants Dream.

Playback of the files was on the whole smooth and crisp. There were a few very, very minor glitches in the form of a bit of pixelation in the Elephants Dream, during one of the fast moving sequences. But you really wouldn't notice it if you weren't actively looking for it as I was.

 

To expand a little on what is essentially the whole point that this motherboard was designed for, I also hooked the AN-M2HD to a 37" LG 37LF65 1080p HD TV via a HDMI to HDMI cable. There was no hassle in setting it up as everything was automatically detected. This helped testing by adding the audio on the same connection, where as the HDMI to DVI cable relied on the on-board Realtek chip to reproduce the sound. I used the same videos as the 2407 and I must say it was a fantastic experience.

 

HDTach Results

HDTach is a freeware program that performs a quick benchmark of the systems hard drives and interface. It provides the user with info on various aspects of the disk and disk interface's performance including the read speed in mbps and the percentage of CPU that's used by accessing the drive. Both of which are shown in the graph below.

 

As you can see the AN-M2HD actually edged out the F-I90HD in the read tests, showing that the Nforce 630 chip performs perfectly well in this department. The CPU usage was equal at 2%. Meaning that there's going to be virtually no cycles taken up by disk access.

Cinebench 10

Cinebench is a benchmarking program that assesses the performance of the computer. It's based on Maxon's popular animation software, Cinema 4D. This benchmark tests the main aspects of the setup thoroughly, through rigorous CPU and GPU tests. Unfortunately, I didn't really have a board targeted at the same market as this one to compare, as the version of Cinebench used for the F-I90HD was 9.5, and therefore the scores differed too much.

 

 

 

 The AN-M2HD is once again a little restricted in the test by the CPU. The scores weren't too bad however.