The WinFast PxVC1100 is an MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card developed by Leadtek and features the Toshiba high-performance stream processor SpursEngine. The WinFast PxVC1100 has four Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores based on the "Cell Broadband Engine”. Read on to see how this single slot PCI-Express based low profile card does on our Intel Core i7 system!

Compared to even the latest CPU and Graphics hardware, the Spurs Engine held its own. Though testing different encoding/transcoding types and programs can be quite a headache, it’s easy to see that the Leadtek WinFast PxVC1100 is an MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card can benefit those who do large amounts of this type of work. While there are only a couple of different formats to be used, they process very quickly and have outstanding quality. I have seen a lot of questions about taking SD quality video and converting to an HD format and most are answered with “don’t waste your time because it will be the same quality.” Well with the Spurs Engine, that answer can be thrown out. While taking SD quality video and reaching the quality of an original HD source would be impossible, the content was very clearly much higher quality than the source. Best of all was that this process was quick, encoding at about 20% faster than real time playback...