Graphics are powered by the Intel GMA950 chipset, which offers limited 3D performance but it is excellent for office use.

Running specialized benchmarks that would unveil the 3D graphics performance of the Intel GMA950 chip would be useless since the results would be very low compared to a graphics card. So our interest was mostly at the Video playback area, where such a small box could be useful. Since most of the encoded video files are not natively supported by Windows, we used the latest K-Lite Mega Codec v4.4.2 and run some video playback tests.

Reproduction of Xvid/Divx files up to 8Mbit we tested was flawless and the CPU load was ~20~30% with the QPel encoding function enabled and disabled.

Play back of 720p (1280x720) Xvid files was also not a problem and the CPU load was slightly increased ~ 37%. The DivX 720p HD Trailier playback was very good with only 3~4 dropped frames in renderer, mostly when we maximized the player's window. Proceeding to higher 1080p Divx HD video made things tougher, and the reproduction was rather jerky...

Then we run some MPEG 2 video file tests. Here the playback is very good, and even 1080p clips were playable.

The tested MPEG 2 clips were playable until the 12Mbit rate. The 704x576x18Mbit MPEG 2 video file was not playable using both the Media Player Classic or the Windows Media Player.

Speaking of Windows Media Player, let's pass to more advanced files, like Mpeg4 AVC. The VC1 compatible clips from Microsoft showed that the 720p60_15Mbit file had a very jerky playback, while the 720p30_8Mbit file was perfectly playable.

The WMV files we downloaded from Microsoft's web site at 720p were also flawlessly reproduced with Windows Media Player, while we witnessed problems during playback using the Media Player Classic.

The 1080p_The_Magic_Of_Flight clip was not playable and many flames were dropped.

The x264 format was also easily handled by the Intel GMA950 graphics engine, with DVD-sized clips (704x288) to be playable even at 8Mbit. On the other hand, playing higher quality videos (1080p) was a rather difficult task.

After having tested all clips with KLite Mega Codec v4.4.2, we switched to the CoreAVC v1.8.5.0 (20081017) playback software and hoping to to have better results.

After sometime we realized that t despite the change, the results remained more or less the same.

To sum up, the Shuttle X27D is only capable of playing videos with resolutions of up to 720p, while the maximum bit rate is 12Mbits. Beyond that point, video reproduction may be difficult and not smooth at all.