Despite the latest advances in CPU design, dedicated transcoding cards are quickly becoming a necessity for those that encode a lot of HD video. For a sub-$300 card, the Leadtek PxVC1100 performed surprisingly well in our tests. Thanks to Toshiba's SpursEngine processor, it was able to encode HD video in less than real time. More importantly, the video produced by the PxVC1100 was on par with that from TMPGEnc's software encoder and the much more expensive Matrox CompressHD.



Link: CDRLabs