Pros: Nice small card. Fanless. Puts out something to my Panasonic Plasma TV at 1920x1080 @ 60Hz, unlike two other ATi cards I have tried (X1550 and X1300). PowerDVD accepts it for HD video playback.

Cons: Does not accelerate HD video properly. 1080i broadcast TV does not de-interlace to 60fps correctly, unlike the X1300 which does it perfectly. For HD DVD and Blu Ray playback, it orignally accelerated VC-1 video perfectly, using less than 10% CPU with a 1.6 GHz Sempron! It did not however accelerate H.264/AVC video at all, and in a more recent test with the latest drivers, VC-1 acceleration was no longer working. Also caused a lot of crashes and problems in PowerDVD while playing the Heroes set of HD DVDs, all of which went away with another video card. Also, when acceleration was working, the video was limited to a 1280x720 window with a huge black border when displayed at 1920x1080. 1080p 60Hz signal to my Plasma TV worked, but did not go full screen (small black border).

Overall Review: I used this card with a Windows XP SP2 system. Perhaps a Vista system is needed for the card to work properly with HD video. I am instead using a GeForce 7600GT card, which provides no acceleration either, but works perfectly with my Plasma TV. I am relying on a dual core Athlon64 2.3 GHz CPU for HD disc playback and so far it has not let me down.