In order to perform our BD Movie Playback tests, we used the "Casino Royale" (DL BD) movie.

The drive's minimum system requirements for BD playback are:

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or higher
• Memory: 512 MB RAM or higher
• OS: Windows 2000 SP4 / XP / Vista

However, the recommended specifications for BD Playback and Authoring are:

• CPU: Intel Pentium D 3.4 or higher
• Memory: 1GB RAM or higher
• OS: Windows XP SP2 / Vista
• GPU: nVidia GeForce 7600GT/ 7800GTX512/ 7900GXS/ 7900GX2/ 7900GTX/ 7950GT/ 7950GX2/ 8400GS/ 8500GT/ 8600GT/ 8600GTS/ 8800GTS/ 8800GTX and ATI X1600/ X1800/ X1900/ HD2400/ HD2600/ HD2900 series or above.
• HDCP capable graphics cards with 256 MB RAM, PCI Express x 16, 1920 x 1200 resolution, 32-bit color.
• HDCP capable monitor / TV for HD digital output.

Our testing system consisted of the following:

• Intel Core2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz
• 2046MB RAM (Samsung DDR3)
• Windows XP Professional SP2
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS with 256 MB RAM
• a typical non-HDCP monitor, using a resolution of 1600x1200 at 85 Hz
• an LG L246WH-BN 24" Full-HD LCD monitor, HDCP ready 1920x1200@60Hz.

First, we connected our non-HDCP monitor with a typical analog (VGA) connector. The reason of us doing this, was our intention to check the expected downgrade on the image quality, when using an analog monitor instead of an HDCP-capable. For the same reason, we used the highest possible resolution with this monitor, which was also close enough to the High Definition specifications.

Then we connected the an LG L246WH-BN 24" Full-HD LCD monitor, which was HDCP ready and offers a maximum resolution of 1920x1200@60Hz.

Should someone want to watch a BD movie on an HDCP capable TV, he would have to connect the graphics card digital output to the TV's digital input, and also connect the output of the audio card to the adjacent TV/Home Cinema input.

The application we used to watch the movies was Cyberlink Power DVD v8.

Here are some photos of the monitor during playback:

In this frame PowerDVD shows us info about the movie and the video/audio bitrate for a specific scene. This varied from approximately 10Mbps to 45Mbps, depending on the complexity of each scene of the movie.

Playback was flawless with the CPU utilization to hardly reach the 25%, for the specific PC configuration. Forward/reverse operations were resumed without any problems throughout the complete movie.