Hands on: High def, low power

Sapphire versus Gigabyte
With the Sapphire card fitted, Casino Royale consumed between 75-90 per cent of the main processor’s resources. Playback remained smooth, but during some of the more demanding scenes, it was right up against the system’s peak capabilities. Switching to X-Men III regularly saw the processor max-out and playback become quite choppy.

With the Gigabyte card this improved, but not by much at first. Casino Royale and X-Men III consumed around 75 and 85 per cent, respectively, which didn’t seem to be taking the entire strain from the main processor.

In order to support Nvidia’s full HD acceleration, you’ll need to install a patch to update Power DVD to build 2911 and be running the latest Forceware driver. At the time of writing, support had only been built into the Release 158 Vista driver, with support for XP coming in the future.

With both Power DVD and the driver updated, there was quite a transformation. The processor hit while playing Casino Royale fell to an average of just 25 per cent, while X-Men III rarely topped 30 per cent. These results correspond to Nvidia’s claims of between 20-30 per cent processor hit for common HD titles.

Taking the load
Nvidia’s acceleration certainly does the trick ­ as long as you’re running the latest driver under Vista and have support from your HD software player. It allowed our Core Duo T2600 system to smoothly decode even the toughest HD titles while still having plenty of power remaining to run other tasks.

Gigabyte’s card is a great choice for entertainment PCs with its silent cooling, although you’ll need a full-height case and its massive heatsink will occupy two slots worth of space. It also represents good value at £130 compared with our only other option, which was to upgrade the processor to a pricey T7600.

Of course, there are further pros and cons to both upgrades, as the processor could squeeze into a low-profile case and benefit all applications, whereas the graphics card is physically large and dedicated to only accelerating 3D and media playback.

Either way, Nvidia’s latest GPUs can certainly take the load when it comes to decoding HD material and are definitely worth considering if your PC is feeling the strain.