TUL has its mind on TV

TUL ALSO KNOWN POWERCOLOR HAD a few interesting ATI cards on display at Computex, but the real fun was in the video side of things. First was the vid cards, and the new Silent Cooling System 2, or SCS2. It is a couple of massive heatpipes and heatsinks wrapped around a Radeon X800XL with 512MB of RAM. It has a huge, low speed fan on one side, and while it was impossible to hear anything on the show floor, it theoretically should be very quiet.

The heatsink pictured was on some cards, a much blockier and square version was on another. TUL also was showing a 512MB X700 with a much smaller heatsink and heatpipes. It should also be very quiet for the same reasons as it's big brother.

The fun at TUL was in the video capture cards, they have ATI Theater 550 Pro cards in both PCI and PCIe formats. They had a demo box with a video card in the 16x slot, and a couple of 550s, one PCI, the other PCIe, all running at once.

The coolest part about this is not the cards, they are not the point. The i-TV Theatre software comes with some cards. What it does is to turn the machine with the card into a video server, you can plan and record TV like you normally would with any PVR.

i-TV steps out of the box by allowing you to stream that content to any PC in your house. It is almost enough to make me want to get a TV again. This software, if it is as good as it looks, would make me recommend the TUL cards hands down over competitors. The devil is in the details, hopefully TUL exorcised them. µ