Leadtek Winfast PxVC1100

INTRODUCTION

Multimedia encoding seems to be the rage of in the computer industry. This is partly due to a heavy push by NVIDIA with their GPU accelerated HD encoding. In addition, the widespread of digital contents in all cell phones, digital cameras, digital camcorders, MP3 players, and MP4 players mean that there is a great demand in transcoding one digital media format to other.

Back in 2000, Sony, Toshiba, and IBM formed an alliance called STI to design and manufacture a processor. The collaboration of the three giants in the computer industry is the result of the Cell processor that combines a general-purpose Power Architecture core with streamlines co-processing elements that accelerates multimedia and vector processing application. The most widely recognized Cell processor based application would be the Sony's PlayStation 3 game console.

Cell processor is designed in a way that it is flexible. IBM takes the Cell architecture and incorporate it into servers due to its strong performance in the floating point calculation and the processor's emphasizes of bandwidth over latency and power efficiency. Toshiba, on the other hand, takes the Cell processor and incorporates it into HDTV and multi-media environment. The result is the SpursEngine SE1000 stream processor the company has released recently.

Toshiba has a big plan with the SpursEngine as it will be incorporated into various hardware from laptops, desktop add-on cards, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. It is also possible to use the processor in an environment that requires large-volume HD image processing, and hand/face gesture recognition. In fact, Toshiba Notebook PC and Qosmio G50 haves already included such technology.

Our review sample Leadtek WinFast PxVC1100 is one of the first desktop add-on cards that takes the Toshiba's SpursEngine's power for digital video encoding to the next level.

Leadtek

Founded in 1986, Leadtek is doing something slightly different than other manufacturers.  Their company has invested tremendous resource in research and development.  In fact, they state that "Research and development has been the heart and soul of Leadtek corporate policy and vision from the start. Credence to this is born out in the fact that annually 30% of the employees are engaged in, and 5% of the revenue is invested in, R&D."

Furthermore, the company focuses on their customers and provides high quality products with added value:

"Innovation and Quality " are all and intrinsic part of our corporate policy. We have never failed to stress the importance of strong R&D capabilities if we are to continue to make high quality products with added value.

By doing so, our products will not only go on winning favorable reviews in the professional media and at exhibitions around the world but the respect and loyalty of the market.

For Leadtek, our customers really do come first and their satisfaction is paramount important to us.