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ASRock Z68 Extreme 4 (Intel Z68) Motherboard Review

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

  • Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
  • Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
  • Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
  • Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
  • Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
  • Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

Nvidia Cuda acceleration is disabled, then enabled. Both times are recorded.

9 minutes and 4 seconds with hardware acceleration disabled is a very good result, one of the best you are likely to see. When we enable the GTX580 hardware acceleration however the time is reduced significantly to 7 minutes and 23 seconds. It is worth mentioning that when using an ATOM powered system, this same test takes 1 hour and 20 minutes.

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19 comments

  1. Thats a great product, ive read a few reviews lately on various sites and they seem to score well. Arent they owned by ASUS ?

  2. I haven’t even got my P67 changed yet to B3 revision. might just sell it on ebay and buy one of these.

  3. The B3 revision was overhyped. there was no big deal about the sata problems anyway. just a lot of nonsense. Intel lost a billion over basically very little.

  4. The SSD caching technology is a great idea, but I think it might end up in no mans land.

    why? well the people who are educated enough to know about it, will already have an SSD as a boot drive. a mechanical drive for storage. therefore useless.

    Those people who have a simple system with say a 500GB HD and nothing else, they wont rush out to get an SSD to take their system apart to set it up for caching. Its not that easy to do all that, and joe public wont even understand the differences. its a mid way no mans land approach imo. cool idea mind you.

  5. Come on, why not spend some time fixing teh bandwidth issues with two cards? rather than spend such a long time on bloody SSD caching 10 people will use.

  6. Its too close to p67, its confusing people. I think they are trying to lose the P67 flawed concerns, I know people who arent buying Intel atm, even though P67 is fixed and wouldnt even affect 99% of people buying one.

  7. How much is it?

  8. Its only marginally more expensive that P67, but I wonder if its cause of that sh**ty lucid nonsense they put on it. who the f*** wants that? eh?

  9. Im not interested in these products. Its such a dumb release IMHO.

  10. How often do ASRock update their bios. their website is slow as all hell for me to find out. I heard it was terrible.

  11. I like the CPU slot area, its free of crap. really helps with some fitting.s I just opted for a D14 last month. No interest in Z68 for the time being. I use a 128GB SSD already. seems about the only thing worth moving for. Lucid? seriously?

  12. Shame you didnt use the 2500k. no one uses it anymore for reviews. you used it for the verification too ! im gutted 🙁

  13. this can take 8GB DDR3 modules? are they even out yet?

  14. I wouldnt touch ASROCK with a 50 foot stick. I bought a board from them last year and it died installing windows. POS.

  15. I think ASROCK should make one with a dedicated sound card like ASUS, realtek onboard is crap.

  16. long time reader, but I hate this recapthca nonsense so I never post.

    If this goes through, can I make a request? Can you include temperature results from your review? placing diodes on the heatsinks? I really would like to know how hot the heatsinks get. no one does this and its so impotrant.

  17. ASRock will have a tough time in the UK. ASUS really dominate. and @Fred, no they arent a part of ASUS

  18. Umm, not to be disrespectful, but isn’t the point of virtu that it will save you power on i mode, though GPUs these days tend to have very capable power-scaling capabilities – shouldn’t you have looked into the this?

  19. @Tommyboy and @Victor, Lucid Virtue is actually an excellent feature when setup in discrete mode (screen connected to the GC instead of on the motherboard towards the Intel HD Graphics on the CPU) : whenever I need to transcode a video from one format to another, Virtue will automatically switch processes to the CPU’s GPU instead of the graphics card, the later being much MUCH more efficient than any Graphic cards on the market (about 40% gain). A must have for any serious video transcoding job. The only thing is that not many software vendors had the time to implement routines specifically coded with Intel’s HD “libraries” in mind – Media Espresso deos this, but I don’t know about others like Adobe or Autodesk, however they should implement Intel’s HD capabilities, it’s so much more efficient! In short, Virtue will switch between your GC and Intel’s HD depending on the task at hand and choosing the most proficient GPU for the job.