Tul / Powercolor

The most exciting product at Powercolor was this VGA watercooling system that is based on a cooler from Cooler Master. As you can see the tubing has no problems with sharp bends like in the area where the tubing goes to the second video card. A waterflow indicator is included as well since the black tubing doesn't allow to check flowrate with a quick look.


Also on display was the Radeon X1800 GTO which is a trimmed down version of the X1800 with "only" 12 shader processors and 256 MB memory. I will try to get my hands on these, maybe an unlock is possible.


If you are using a high definition TV you have certainly heard about HDMI which is a digital way of transmitting video data. Think of it as DVI for TVs. Once you are looking into transmitting HDTV quality movies from your media PC to the TV you will quickly run into signal quality issues. Another problem might be that a DVI -> HDMI converter cable can not do HDCP (copy protection). Some TVs are configured to allow high definition content playback only when it's HDCP encoded. So you end up with a black screen.
This X1300 card from Powercolor solves the problem and gives you an HDMI port which is HDCP capable and can do audio via HDMI as well (DVI -> HDMI can't do that either).

[sorry no picture]
Another novelty was an ATI Theatre 650 based TV card. Theatre 550 has been out for a while now, the new version has improved video post processing capabilities. Technically an "old" feature of the Theater 650 is that is uses the PCI bus interface instead of the PCI-E x1 bus like the 550 cards did.