Broadcom Crystal HD Video Accelerator Tested in Dell Mini

The Broadcom Crystal HD (BCM70012) is not exactly news, but we’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to it here because it’s taken so long for it to come out. Also, never mind that nVidia’s Ion solution is, well, pretty damn good. However, for those of you who have a netbook and would like to enjoy HD video on it and don’t have the good fortune of having a Ion chipset, you may be in luck because this $30 mini PCI-e card may breathe a little life back into your netbook.

First, it’s not the holy grail of HD video decoders, however, it does do a pretty fine job it appears from tests. Though it’s still trailing behind what you can expect from an Ion-powered machine, it still is worth looking at.

Without pimping all of the hard work done in testing the chip, you can expect anywhere from about a double in performance to over five times the performance when playing 1080p video. For $30 and a minute or two to install, that’s not bad at all. I’d like to see one of these in an old nettop, but for those who haven’t already picked a machine up, you may as well just buy a better-equipped box with an Ion chipset powering it that way you have nothing to worry about.

Of note: Adobe has been making Flash less crappy, slowly but surely, and with the introduction of GPU acceleration into the 10.1 beta, you might hope that the Broadcom Crystal HD would be capable of accelerating Flash, but the word is this is not the case. However, Adobe plans to add support for the Broadcom card in their next beta release, so you should see some CPU cycles freed up some time February if you’re using the BCM70012.

For more, see the tests at Laptop Mag.