Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L

Nero Recode

Where video conversion is concerned, one of the applications I’ve grown to enjoy over the years is Nero Recode. Though it’s export options are extremely limited, they offer high image quality and decent file weight. Nero 8 was launched last fall, and you can read our review, if interested.

For this test, we’ve first ripped our copy of our concert DVD, Killadelphia, by Lamb of God. The original DVD rip weighs in at 7.7GB, but we are using Nero to reconvert it to 4.5GB so that it will fit on a normal-sized DVD to use as a backup. Our “mobile” test consists of converting the main concert footage to the same resolution a Sony PSP uses (480×272) which results in a 700MB file.

The P31-DS3L continues to do well, hitting the second spot here for the DVD Recode. Things change with the iPod video – it took the longest.

DivX 6.7

For our DivX testing, we use a 0.99GB high-quality DivX .AVI of Half-Life 2: Episode Two game play. The video is just under 4 minutes in length and is in 720p resolution, which equates to a video bit rate of ~45Mbps, not dissimilar to standard 720p movies. We converted the video two different ways.

First, we encoded the video at the same resolution but a lower quality, so as to achieve a far more acceptable file size (~150MB). The second method is encoding of the same video, but to a 480×272 resolution, similar to what some mobile devices use.

Differences between the higher-end boards is nil, but the P31-DS3L proved 3 – 4 seconds slower in each test.