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This wont be your usual Hexus review in terms of the benchmark tests that we run since the M-9000 really isn't designed for the class of tests that we run. It's never going to be the base for a performance workstation which our usual tests target. So instead I'll take a subjective look at the performance of the M-9000 doing tasks that you yourself will put it to work doing. Local video and audio playback and video and audio streaming across the network are what I'll concentrate on.
Local video and audio playback
DVD playback was fine, hardly any dropped frames during playback and the output onto television looked excellent. Video display on the monitor was fine, the DAC doing a fine job of displaying a nice picture and the SVHS output looking sharp and full of colour on my television. The MPEG-2 decoder seemed to be doing a sterling job at keeping the playback rate smooth and steady. You get decent options for tweaking the hardware overlay used to display the video.
Overlay adjustment
Apart from gamma adjustment, it's the same range of controls you'll find on ATI's latest Radeon hardware so it offers the same basic range of display tweaking as other desktop solutions.
The S3 Display tab lets you adjust settings for any detected connected devices like a television.
As far as DivX/MPEG-4 playback was concerned, the M-9000 fared a lot less well. The absence of hardware assistance for MPEG-4 video means that only low bitrate video played back well. The lack of CPU power and low memory bandwidth available means the CPU is processing all the video data and on high bitrate streams, along with an audio stream to decode too, it just couldn't cope. My personal preference is for high bitrate DivX to keep as much quality as possible from the original DVD source and my own high bitrate movies were unwatchable with noticable frame dropping and audio sync issues that simply aren't present on my XP2400+/nForce2/Radeon 9700 Pro test bed.
It seemed the cutoff video rate for watchable video with a 128Kbit/sec MP3 audio stream was around 500Kbit/sec, less than a third of the bitrate of the video I usually create and enjoy at the resolution I use for TV display. Lowering the resolution of my video output or cutting the data rate was sufficient to produce watchable output, but with a quality loss I couldn't stomach.
Simple audio playback though 6 channels was fine. If the M-9000 doesn't have to decode and playback video too, audio playback locally is excellent, there's plenty of CPU power to do that. What about streaming the video and audio data across the network?
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