Powercolor is now a mobo company

Tag : Decoding Card

POWERCOLOR HAD A lot of toys out in force at Computex including a few that no oneelse did. They also are jumping into the mobo game as well, welcometo the fight guys.
The first thing is obvious, and it is more of a tip of the hat tothe emerging notebook market than anything else. You see the threesquare cards in the middle? Those are notebook video cards, andPowercolor makes them as well. The high end one is a mobile 3870/M88C , so no news on the chip front there. The fact that mainstream GPUmakers are aiming at standardised notebook GPUs, well that is news.

All goodies but the important one
The two purple cards on display are the Theater 600 and 650 we told you about at CeBIT . The short story one is PCI, the other PCIe. The PCIe has hardwareencoding as well as decoding, but other than that, they are justsolid TV cards.
If you take a look at the 3850 card, you will not notice the Zalmancooler because it is face down, but it has one. The card itselfwould be unremarkable if it weren't for the AGP interface. There ishope for all you single core A64 and midrange P4 owners out therewho want a gaming upgrade, this card should do nicely.

This is the first Powercolor mobo
The next item was the biggest surprise, mobos from Powercolor.Don't expect them to rival Gigabyte any time soon, they willprobably only have a handful of SKUs on the market, but they willbe tailored to bundle low end cards.
ATI's 'hybrid' strategy is quite nice, and allows board makers toimprove their GPU attach rate quite a bit. I wouldn't be surprisedif a lot of GPU makers jumped on board this train soon, not doingso is basically money left on the table. Powercolor is ahead of thecurve here.
One last thing that we could not take a picture of, they had a 4870board on display. It looked a lot like the current 3870, two slotsand a bunch of heatpipes. If you looked carefully though, you sawAMD's secret weapon, heat.
The new high-end AMD part only has two heatpipes, meaning this cardis a power sipper, not just a power color, pun pun. It is going tobe really interesting to see how well this lines up against theNvidia 236W monster in a few weeks. Game on. µ