Benchmarks - Note on 1080p HD and Blu-ray Playback

Now that we have had a good close look inside and outside of the system, we can move onto the benchmarking side of things and see how the Giada Slim-N10 performs.

Before we move onto the actual benchmarks, though, I want to make a couple notes about 1080p HD playback as well as Blu-ray playback.

We tested SDTV, 720p and 1080p playback on the system and we can happily report that the system had no issues playing back this sort of HD content. Playback was smooth without dropping frames and the image quality produced was fine. We can notch all this up to the NVIDIA Ion chipset taking charge and offloading the work from the CPU.

As for Blu-ray playback, unfortunately we were unable to do any tests since we no longer have a USB 2.0 Blu-ray optical drive handy. However, based on our testing with the ASRock ION 330-BD nettop system back in June of this year, thanks again to the NVIDIA Ion chipset, we can say that the Giada Slim-N10 won't have any issues with Blu-ray playback. You can see our CPU usage results here with the ASRock system for rough comparison. That means that the movies will playback smooth and look fine, but it does not mean you will get the full HD audio experience since these types of system are not capable of outputting Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA as bitstream. This is normal for most computers, so don't let it concern you too much.

Now let's move onto our first benchmark on the next page. We will be comparing the Giada system against the ASRock ION 330-BD nettop system back in June of this year, which you can read more about here. Both systems have Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installed, but the Giada system uses newer drivers including the NVIDIA GeForce/ION Driver 195.62 and NVIDIA ION Chipset Driver 15.51. You can see the CPU-Z screenshot of the Giada system above and the validation link for reference is here.