I notice some people only got computers with PCI slots. This is great for people with no pci express of AGP slots. so they are great for customers that want to have there computers with old slots.

They add speed, more effects and easy to install.

Wonderful, except they've all got fans on them.

Why?

The noisiest thing in my HTPC is the hard drive (which is quite quiet). I'm not going to be adding a tiny, noisy fan to it.

Epic fail.

Great news, great article! If you look a bit outside the PC box, you may also notice other computers, most of them with PCI bus and hopelessly out-dated graphics adapters. I could use a big 70*54 cm^2 monitor with 2560*1600 pixels for my OpenVMS/Alpha system. But are we going to see the software support?

For my Pentium 4 PC with AGP interface, the ATI 3850 AGP was the best thing that could happen to it. Thank you to ATI and thank you to The Inquirer for doing the marketing :-) AMD's ATI web site sucks.

I really don't see much of a point to having these higher end chips on PCI slots.
There are few motherboards out there that don't have a PCI-e or even an AGP slot that would actually be able to support CPUs or RAM fast enough to make use of the extra video power these cards would provide.

Even with hardware HD video decoding on the card, a decent CPU and RAM is still required for HD media playback such as Blu-ray and MPEG4 based video files. SD video and audio playback on the other hand can be handled easily by older integrated Intel graphics with only an average single core CPU and a small amount of RAM.

Plus, with the likes of the AMD 780G and Nvidia 8200 chipsets available that can do video decoding just as well as a dedicated card (if not better in some cases) and can be found in on a microATX board (that takes up even less room in a low profile case), there is really no benefit in these cards...

Albatron is big on promotions , fairs etc but very small on availability. I never got hold of their turion motherboards which they announced with big fanfare long time ago. Do not lift your hopes until you see one in shop or online. Albatron may have innovative products but they seriously need to work on their marketing / sales in uk

You have no idea how much this would mean to me. You see, I got one of the following for 66 bucks cad.

Intel BOXD945GCLF

A mini itx board that comes with an Atom! Sadly, the integrated video is a piece of junk. Worse, it only comes with a PCI slot.. can't even run a crappy 2400 pro on it. If this card ever makes it into the channels, I will grab one for sure! Hopefully, it'll be better than the G45 miniitx coming out.

One article on the front page is lauding the apparently clever introduction of 8600 & 8400 PCI cards, while another article on the same page in typically quiet fashion points out that all 8600 & 8400 parts are fundamentally borked and will only result in massive failures and recalls?

If this joined up thinking were exhibited by a PR bunny, the Inq would be all over them, daubing them in paint and decrying the wooly headed stupidity of the PR bunny compared to the razor sharp acuity of the average Inq journo.

Not that the Inq would be lazily rehashing PR bunnies' launch fluff pieces and passing them off as content.... *cough*