In the world of graphics cards, it’s often incredibly hard to differentiate one vendor from another because nearly everyone has a card that’s built off of the same reference design. So what do you do? You can either build in lots of extra features or you can offer overclocking options.. OR you can have a snazzy product name. Case in point – Albatron. They’ve introduced a new product called the “Blue Ray Decoder Card” (The reason they chose to call it “Blue” was to emphasize the fact that this card is designed for high definition discs like Blu-ray and HD DVD that utilize blue laser technology.) which makes it sound like a standalone Blu-ray decoder expansion card when it fact, it’s just a regular NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT based graphics card with NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology.

The key to the Albatron “Blue Ray Decoder Card” is the use of NVIDIA’s GeForce 8500GT GPU which employs NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD Technology. PureVideo HD offloads video decoding to the graphics cards’ GPU as opposed to using your computer’s CPU thereby freeing up your PC to do other tasks. According to Albatron, systems utilizing Intel Core 2 Duo processors and PureVideo HD technology have shown CPU utilizations under 20 percent while decoding high definition video. The card supports H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video codecs which also means both Blu-ray and HD DVD are easily supported here.

Specs to the Albatron “Blue Ray Decoder Card” are as follows:

• Low profile VGA card
• 450MHz Core Clock Speed
• NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT GPU
• 256MB of DDRIII memory
• 128 bit memory interface
• 800MHz memory bus speeds
• PCI Express bus
• Dual-link DVI support for up to 2560 x 1600
• DVI and HDTV output
• HDCP support

[Check it out]

[Check out their press release]

Technorati Tags: Albatron, Blue Ray Decoder Card, HDTV, Blu-ray, HD DVD, NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT GPU