12 HD Days of Christmas: Day 2
"On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me"....
Hmmm, entering into a committed relationship with my new 360 hasn't left much time for such antiquated things as human contact, but if you see any women who like to give out gift-wrapped ATI All-in-Wonder X1800 XL's, let me know. Walk with me and find out why high end videocards aren't just for gamers anymore.
Previous HD Days of Christmas:
So why this videocard, instead of competitors like NVIDIA's 7800?
Besides the All-in-Wonder's history of being a great all around media card, this latest iteration brings you
- Hardware-accelerated video transcoding (coming soon)
- OTA HDTV tuner support (add-on)
- PVR and video editing capabilities out of the box
- MPEG 1/2/4 hardware encode and decode acceleration
- 10-bit color support
- Component output via adapter
All this wrapped up as a part of ATI's Avivo platform
for bringing high definition content to the PC and improving both performance and quality. The All-in-Wonder comes equipped to drive dual displays, and includes an excellent remote with support for Windows Media Center. It's a bit pricey at $429 from ATI.com (it can be found for less) but isn't that perfect gift for a loved one worth it?