Digital Home Thoughts: SpursEngine-based Video Encoding Accelerator from Leadtek

"Well, it looks like Toshiba isn't just keeping its Cell-based SpursEngine chip confined to its laptops and super-resolution DVD players, as Leadtek has now also taken the wraps off a PCI-E card that'll let you add some of that "faster than real-time" HD video transcoding to your desktop PC. Dubbed the WinFast PxVC1100, the card promises to encode and decode H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video with ease (and entirely in hardware), and it includes 128MB of 1.6GHz XDR memory to aid in the process."

I was initially really excited about this, because anything that speeds up h.264 encoding is of benefit to me, but the devil is in the details, and these details are looking a bit devilish: pricing looks to be about $285 or so in Japan, so I might see it in North America for around the $249 to $300 mark. I'm willing to pay to save time, but $300 is a pretty steep ticket. Any modern GPU worth its silicon does assisted decoding, so for most computers the only benefit will be encoding - and not everyone is as impatient as me. There's also the matter of it having a fan on it - I hate noisey computers. I really, really hate noisy computers, and I'm surprised with that large heatsink they weren't able to cool it passively - I'm hoping that fan is ultra-low RPM and deadly quiet. I might be judging this product too harshly, but rather than being a $99 "sure, it can't hurt" product, this is as expensive as a mid-range gaming video card. And I haven't even mentioned the fact that both NVIDIA and ATI are just at the beginning of their own path of using our GPUs to assist the encoding of content. This product has a rough road ahead of it...