Powercolor is now a mobo company

POWERCOLOR HAD A lot of toys out in force at Computex including a few that no one else did. They also are jumping into the mobo game as well, welcome to the fight guys.

The first thing is obvious, and it is more of a tip of the hat to the emerging notebook market than anything else. You see the three square cards in the middle? Those are notebook video cards, and Powercolor 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 GPU makers 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 hardware encoding as well as decoding, but other than that, they are just solid TV cards.

If you take a look at the 3850 card, you will not notice the Zalman cooler because it is face down, but it has one. The card itself would be unremarkable if it weren't for the AGP interface. There is hope for all you single core A64 and midrange P4 owners out there who 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 will probably only have a handful of SKUs on the market, but they will be tailored to bundle low end cards.

ATI's 'hybrid' strategy is quite nice, and allows board makers to improve their GPU attach rate quite a bit. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of GPU makers jumped on board this train soon, not doing so is basically money left on the table. Powercolor is ahead of the curve here.

One last thing that we could not take a picture of, they had a 4870 board on display. It looked a lot like the current 3870, two slots and a bunch of heatpipes. If you looked carefully though, you saw AMD's secret weapon, heat.

The new high-end AMD part only has two heatpipes, meaning this card is a power sipper, not just a power color, pun pun. It is going to be really interesting to see how well this lines up against the Nvidia 236W monster in a few weeks. Game on. µ