Asus Bravo 220 review – media card

1. Introduction2. The Bundle3. The Asus Bravo 220 GFX4. The Software5. Gaming performance6. Media Performance7. Thermal Performance8. Power Consumption9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

I admit it, I am a technology junkie and I always have been, when other kids were playing with Star Wars figures I was disassembling my father's radio and trying to figure out how it worked. “You got an unhealthy fixation, son” he would mutter as he slapped me on the head in disgust.

In later years when I bought a Carl Fogarty Ducati 996S, I took the bike apart and starting messing with mappings on my laptop generally trying to make it run better. I have probably broken as much as I have fixed, but I would never admit that. Hell, is this on?

When you label yourself a junkie it means that you are addicted in an unhealthy way to the topic of discussion .. it has gotten me into all sorts of trouble throughout the years, including starting several technology websites to feed my passions.

One of my ever increasing addictions in the area of technology is creating and tinkering with various media PC configurations. While my media PC should be sitting discretely beside the TV, it now vaguely resembles a Frankenstein monster. What started life as an Intel Atom small form factor PC has warped into a watercooled Core i7 920 running at 4GHZ on a Rampage Gene II board, with an SSD Raid and custom modded 2GB 285GTX inside a carbon fibre custom Shuttle based Cryo chassis. I even drilled holes and replaced all the fans with silent 12cm Noctua models. In a moment of reflection recently I looked hard, shook my head and wondered what had happened to my initial goals of “low power, silent and out of sight”. This thing sucks so much juice under load it would probably be more economical to go to the movies every night.

That said, what I love about the ‘Z-Special' (stop laughing) is the fact its whisper quiet, lightning fast and you can whip out the Xbox 360 controller and game when friends are over. I am even contemplating whether I should put a 980x into it. Why? I have no idea, I don't need it, I just want to try it. When people tell me its stupid, I just want to try it even more.

By now I am pretty confident I have also been describing a few of our readers, heck maybe even you. This neverending desire to create and mod things we really don't need, to push the limits, bend the rules. Then tell everyone about it afterwards with a smug look.

In the attempts to reduce the power draw of this system I recently had a discussion with Asus and they offered to send me their media center Bravo 220 card to tinker with. Checking the specifications, I thought the card was interesting, it was totally silent (fanless), consumed 21% less power than competiting Geforce 220 models and came bundled with a media software suite specifically designed for Windows. Will I miss the 285GTX? most likely, but lets take a look anyway…

The Asus Bravo 220 arrives in a plain black box with gold writing, its a rather retro design which wouldn't look out of place in Thorntons.

Coffee Creams? yes please, yum.

Like many Asus boxes, this is a gatefold design which opens up and it looks well and details some of the cards features.

The package contains the card, a remote, a receiver base, CD's and manuals. There is also a self adhesive felt grip to attach the receiver.

The manual is well written with illustrations explaining everything. Bonus points for the lack of ‘engrish'.

Above we can see the Asus remote, next to my usual tool of choice, the excellent Gyration remote, which works like a Nintendo Wii controller.

This is the remote receiver and light sensor. Yes, light sensor. This device adapts the onscreen plasma or LCD image via the card (and driver) to suit the ambience of the room.

We know the Geforce GT220 isn't a ‘performance' card, it is a low power product designed for people on a budget and that makes it generally ideal for a media center. The Asus Bravo 220 however has received some PCB tweaks and runs with 21% less power than the reference design. The Asus board is also fanless, which means it produces no noise (0dB) and will be ideal for noise sensitive freaks.

The card is tiny, and is covered in a black heatsink with an overlapping green ‘shroud', which actually isnt there just for appearance, as it enhances the cooling properties across the length of the fins.

Even considering the relative low power demands the heatsink needs to be capable of maintaining reasonably good temperatures under extended load. The card does not require any PCI Express power connectors, it gets enough power direct from the slot.

The more astute among you will notice the fins are angled as they come to the end of the card PCB, this is to aid with heat dispersal.

Shaped like a tree intentionally for the ‘green‘ connotations? We think so.

Memory specifications are as follows.

• Power Supply: VDD, VDDQ = 1.8 V ± 0.1 V
• Double Data Rate architecture: two data transfers per clock cycle
• CAS Latency: 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7
• Burst Length: 4 and 8
• Bi-directional, differential data strobes (DQS and /DQS ) are transmitted / received with data
• Edge-aligned with Read data and center-aligned with Write data
• DLL aligns DQ and DQS transitions with clock
• Differential clock inputs (CLK and /CLK)
• Data masks (DM) for write data
• Commands entered on each positive CLK edge, data and data mask are referenced to both edges of /DQS
• Posted /CAS programmable additive latency supported to make command and data bus efficiency
• Read Latency = Additive Latency plus CAS Latency (RL = AL + CL)
• Off-Chip-Driver impedance adjustment (OCD) and On-Die-Termination (ODT) for better signal quality
• Auto-precharge operation for read and write bursts
• Auto Refresh and Self Refresh modes
• Precharged Power Down and Active Power Down
• Write Data Mask
• Write Latency = Read Latency – 1 (WL = RL – 1)
• Interface: SSTL_18

The card specifications are as follows:

As we can see the card is running at 500mhz core which is 120mhz lower than the reference design. It operates on a 128 bit bus and this model has 1GB of DDR2 memory on board. Memory bandwidth at 800mhz is 12.8gb/s, which is lower than the nVidia design of 25.3gb/s at reference speeds of 1360mhz. This is going to be no gaming beast and is clearly designed just for the media PC environment.

A top down overview of the card. It has a single DVI I connector as well as HDMI and D-Sub. They do not support SLI configurations and have no connector for S/PDIF.

Next, lets take a look at the ASUS Bravo Media software because it is one of the primary selling points of the card.

The manual explains that the CD disc needs to be used as it not only contains the driver, but the software for the receiver and light sensor, which you hook up via USB.

We tried out the card in our main i655K system as well as a Media Center Shuttle chassis. You can just about see the card next to the Noctua NH14 cooler. It really is miniscule.

Unfortunately Asus have decided to bundle the receiver utility in the same install package as the driver, so you are forced to install an outdated Forceware driver to get to the receiver and light sensor technology. Sadly I also had a BSOD after installing but managed to get back into Windows 7 64bit Ultimate. After this I checked Asus site for drivers and didn't see the Bravo listed at all on their support site, just a generic ‘ENGT220 series' driver page. Two drivers are offered, 190.45 (same as on the CD), or a newer 191.07. Just for the record, nVidia's offical drivers are now at 197.77 so these are literally ancient in enthusiast terms.

Hopefully Asus will take note and just have the utility as a seperate install so people can choose to initially install a more up to date driver. After ensuring the receiver was working with the remote I installed new nVidia drivers and everything seemed ok. Bit of a mess though and not a great first experience.

After we had everything ready and installed we loaded up the application, this is achieved by hitting the HOME button on the remote.

This loads up the Bravo Media Center

Calibrating the screen is a straightforward process, simply lining up the four white arrows into the respective corners of the screen. We are using a Panasonic 42inch NeoPDP 600hz Plasma for our testing.

The light sensor was already enabled when we checked.

There are options to change colour settings via built in presets which Asus have coded into the software. We left it on auto.

The main screen of the Bravo software, although you might not be able to tell from these images, the display is extremely pixelated … it clearly has been coded for a much lower resolution than 1080p then upscaled to fill. I was very disappointed with the resolution of the images and text in the software suite, so much so that I had to keep actually checking it was correctly set to 1080p.

An overview of all my hard drives in the system. The icons are huge (this is a photo of the 42 inch screen) and I found no way to reduce them in size, I found these very reminscient of my Amiga workbench days, just with less control over the interface.

First we tested the media player for music files. I found an album on one of my hard drives and highlighted the tracks to play. Pressed play and …

…. It minimised the Bravo application to the taskbar, then loaded the tracks into Windows Media Player. While I can appreciate it is probably a safe option for Asus to use Windows Media Player, surely there is a nicer looking way of doing it? Using the code in the background while keeping the user in the Asus suite? Offering pretty visualisation algorithms for parties? You get none of this, and I see no reason why the user wouldn't just use Windows Media Player in the first place without this clumsy ‘middle man'.

We then tested the video support by selecting an MKV file in the Bravo software package and pressing ‘play' on the remote.

Again this loaded Windows Media Player and we got an error message that the format wasn't supported. As I know MKV is supported in this particular system via a third party codec pack install (CCCP), I double checked the file, natively, in the operating system.

It loaded fine in Windows Media Player and started to play. We can only assume that some hot linking code between the Asus Media suite and WMP isn't quite working the way it should be for specific codecs. We had better luck with DVD discs stored as folders on the system, however we had an irritating random issue with WMP not opening initially as a full screen window when accessed via Asus Media suite.

Asus do offer manual options for media players (which obviously need to be installed beforehand) so we decided to try and change from Windows Media Player to our normal player of choice, the brilliant ArcSoft Total Media Theater 3 Platinum player.

We negotiated to the player via the interface and got the Bravo suite linking to it.

We retested our MKV files.

As you can see above, MKV files worked when we linked to the Arcsoft player, but you need to have the player already opened in the background and set to full screen before loading the Bravo suite.

Why? well if you don't you get exactly what I did in the video above, a windowed mode display … meaning you need to use a mouse to double click the video window to maximise the view. It really just all seems so careless and I was less than impressed with the interface, design, implementation and operation. Can we not stay inside the Bravo media player?

Finally we looked at the ‘transcoding‘ options offered within the suite and when clicked we were presented with a 30 day trial of Cyberlink Mediashow Espresso. 🙁

By this stage, I was frustrated, annoyed and bewildered that this ‘media suite' was ever released in this condition. I could probably spend hours tweaking and adjusting settings, but there are actually very few in the program and I found the nVidia driver panels offered infinitely more fine control when compared with this suite.

Watching videos with the ASUS software running in the background and the light sensor enabled frequently annoyed me as sometimes it would seemingly just adjust brightness and contrast for no apparent reason. Its a nice idea if the room gets suddenly dark to adjust brightness and perhaps even contrast, but unless you live in a shop and the door is constantly opening I fail to see the need. I have presets stored in the panels for day and night viewing, it takes literally two seconds to change them. Automatic options are great, but unless you are easy pleased and not susceptible to slightly wonky software then this should be immediately turned off and deinstalled.

To be honest I actually just ended up going back to my Gryo remote, ditching the Bravo suite completely and unplugging the light sensor/receiver. Let's have a look at the card itself.

While this card is not marketed as a gaming card, we are sure that most users will at one time or another fire up a game for some light entertainment.

We are using this core system for game tests:

Intel Core i5 655k
Corsair 4GB DDR3 @ 1600mhz
Intel DP55WG motherboard
Coolit ECO A.L.C.

This underclocked GT220 fails to produce the goods with AA enabled at 1080p with most modern engines so we just turned it off completely and aimed to get a quick performance overview via an HDTV, which is the target audience.

Gaming is actually not too bad on the Asus Bravo 220, and we could scrape by with less demanding engines if we left off AA and were willing to live with the odd judder here and there. Games like Crysis will need some serious compromises (and resolution drops) if you wish to try and run them, we gave up trying to get a decent combination of resolution and preset, so we didn't include it here. If gaming is your thing then you need to look higher up the scale.

Media Performance is important to analyse as this will be a primary feature of the card so we started by analysing HQV results. We used a few other cards as comparisons with the HQV benchmark.

This HQV Benchmark from Silicon Optix are great tests of the playback quality of HD DVD, DVD and Blu-Ray movies. We used Catalyst 9.5 and Forceware 197.77 for our testing. It is worth pointing out that these tests are in some ways very subjective and are tied into not only the hardware, but the drivers. We have noticed some improvements lately with the recent Catalysts and the HD5770 was included for the sake of being thorough.

HQV Test	Radeon HD5770	Asus Bravo 220	Geforce 9800	Geforce 9600	Geforce 9400
Deinterlacing
Color Bar/Vertical Detail	10	10	10	10	10
Jaggies Pattern 1	5	3	3	3	0
Jaggies Pattern 2	5	3	3	3	0
Waving Flag	5	5	5	5	0
Image Enhancement
Detail Enhancement	10	10	10	10	10
Noise Reduction
Noise Reduction	5	10	10	10	10
Motion Noise Reduction	10	5	10	10	5
PullDown Detection
3:2 Detection	10	10	5	5	5
2:2 Cadence	5	5	5	5	5
2:2:2:4 Cadence	5	5	5	5	5
2:3:3:2 Cadence	5	0	0	0	0
3:2:3:2:2 Cadence	5	5	5	5	5
5:5 Cadence	5	5	5	5	5
6:4 Cadence	5	5	5	5	5
8:7 Cadence	5	5	5	5	5
3:2 Cadence	5	0	5	5	5
Mixed Film and Video
Horizontal Scrolling Text	5	10	10	10	5
Vertical Scrolling Text	10	10	10	10	5
Total Score	120	106	111	111	85

The Asus Bravo gives a very strong result of 106 and although we have seen some recent improvements in the Forceware drivers we still notice a few issues with antialiasing and random artifacting with noise suppression algorithms. To be fair this noise can be adjusted which therefore affects the overall level of detail throughout.

All things considered the IQ results are high which is verified by real world use. I would be very happy using this card in a low powered media PC full time.

We then played back the Bluray disc of AVATAR to judge CPU load.

nVidia's DX 10.1 compatible graphics cards can offload the CPU when decoding VC-1 and the PureVideo engine is considerably better than previous generations. The average CPU load is around 10percent but we noticed a peak of around 24percent in a few locations. As a reference point we played around with a Geforce 210 model and we noticed around a 10-15 percent increase with these figures.

We recorded temperatures at idle after resting in Windows for 30 minutes, and then we tested load by using the synthetic test Furmark. The card was inside a Silverstone Raven 02 for the testing. Room ambient was kept at 25c throughout testing.

The card idles at under 40c inside our Raven 02 and peaks at 63c with Furmark stress test. When gaming, temperatures never exceeded 60c. It is not likely people will be using a Raven 02 with a card like this so we also tested inside a Shuttle HTPC chassis.

Temperatures in the Shuttle rose by a few C at idle and up to 5c under full load. A very good set of results.

Today we are using a Keithley Integra Model 2700/E and we are measuring power consumption at VGA card inputs, not full system drain. To test load we first fire up Resident Evil at high image quality settings then we follow up with the synthetic Furmark which loads the GPU beyond game engine levels … Furmark is not a particularly realistic reading, but its interesting to document.

The figures above show just how little power this card needs to operate. When watching a Bluray for instance the card only consumes around 20 watts of power. In today's climate that is very little indeed.

Sadly this product has failed to impress us, with most issues revolving around the proprietary software bundle.

To install the drivers for the receiver (and remote) you have to install a complete driver package … with outdated forceware driver. There is no way around this as the product is not even properly listed on the Asus support site … well unless you use a generic ENGT220 Asus driver from months ago (Forceware 191, not 197). We would want to see a seperate install for the receiver functionality.

Without trying to gloss over it, the software package is shockingly bad and just doesn't deliver the end user a comfortable, intuitive experience. It is basically a remote control ‘front end' for your ordinary media player and puts me in a position where I really can't recommend it to any of our readers. Having a dedicated transcoding option which basically just ‘links' to a trial version of Cyberlink software was just the icing on the cake.

The light sensor is also flawed, frequently I could experience shifts in colour and brightness which became distracting on our 600hz Panasonic Plasma screen, I ended up removing the Asus software completely, disconnecting the USB based sensor and just running the card with updated Forceware drivers. I would understand this more if I was using it in a room with fluctuating light, but I wasn't. Thinking it might be a bad install, we unfortunately verified the issues on another system.

What solutions have Asus got? they can either ditch the buggy, unfinished software or get it fixed. I am all for cool gimmicks but only if they bring something viable to the table to enhance the user experience. Bravo Media Center fails on all levels and I am quite sure most people expect a full media experience, rather than a quirky front end for media players already installed on their system. It actually reduced functionality of Windows Media Player in our testing, failing completely to work with MKV files.

The card itself is a solid product and I really liked it, the power drain is low, the performance is decent and it doesn't generate a lot of heat which is ideal in a small form factor chassis. It is a much better option than the Nvidia 210 series, which we feel is totally underpowered for any real world use.

In the UK now the card is around the £65 mark which is comparible to a reference design with faster clocks. If you want a silent version of the card however, this is the one to get, just do yourself a favour and run it natively without any of the Asus software installed.

KitGuru says: Remove all the optional junk, charge £10 less and this would score much higher. The card is solid, the bundle isn't.

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