Albatron goes Back to the Future
AFTER DAAMIT TOOK its little 3850 to the AGP slot, it’s time for an even bigger stretch into the past: Albatron has announced their new “Retrotechnology” PCI graphics cards based on Nvidia’s Geforce 8 series GPUs (8600, 8500 and 8400) and – HTPCers rejoice - they’re all low profile. Forget " Hybrid-everything", SLI and hi-res gaming, though, that's for the big boys.
The first card to make it to market will be the PCI 8600GT – 256X, with a 580MHz clock (that’s actually a 40MHz over reference) and 256MB of 800MHz DDR3 memory (also 100MHz over reference) – the shader isn’t running at the standard 2.5 times the core clock, tho’. The card is dual link DVI (but only one DVI-I output) which means you can hook up panels up to 2560x1600, which makes it interesting in a sort of day trader scenario. We doubt you’ll get any 3D apps (except maybe Vista) to run across a combo of these cards - nor will you have anything resembling SLI - but desktop apps should be fine.
We’ll do a bit of a PSA on this one, although Albatron doesn’t mention it in the original announcement, just sticking to the “PCI graphics alive and kicking” slogan: we think that there are a whole bunch of “old” micro-ATX desktops out there that would make fine HTPC/HD video machines given the right upgrade… something that these cards bring to the table. Purevideo HD should let them decode HD video files and output them to your LCD panel via HDMI so no more sucking on thumbs for you.
Office PCs shouldn't complain either, replacing a less-than-adequate IGP with a decent GPU that doesn't steal your RAM. You won’t be challenging your coworkers on Crysis, but you’ve got plenty of features you can hand down to that PC, or add to your current one at home.
No word on pricing yet, but companies tend to go overboard when it comes to retrofitting newer tech to older platforms (non-standard card designs and the premium you’re paying for the uniqueness), let’s hope they have a decent price for blokes on a budget. µ
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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*
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.