As we were all able to feel in the last year the concurrence on IT market was getting lower and lower. Small companies were incorporated by larger ones, bigger companies cracked and giants united their forces. I don't want to be paranoid, but chances for a small company to come up and sell a good and reliable product decrease every year. No matter how good your product is larger companies have sufficient funds to offer a replacement for your product almost for free. In these conditions it is impossible to survive and continue the hard work albeit your product has an extremely good potential or it's based on a revolutionary technology. Microsoft is not the only company which uses such tactics, there are others also but at a smaller scale. One basic rule of free competition says that the best one wins, but unfortunately in real life this may not be entirely true. :)
On the video card market there are not many competitors left, to be more specific in the home / entertainment segment we have only nVidia and ATI struggling for the biggest market share.
Fortunately nVidia produces only video chips while the integration can be done by almost any company interested. So that we can see a shadow of concurrence, but this ghost is based on the same specifications and reference design. The difference between different video cards that use the same chipset is not very big and it's mainly influenced by the manufacturer desire to offer quality, price or both. Today I will take a look to a video card manufactured by a company which didn't enter our lab before: Pine Technology Group. Let's see where and how these guys can change the regular.

First look

We tested the Excalibur GeForce2 Pro video card from Pine Technology, which is a GeForce2 Pro based card with 64Mb DDR, video out and DVI. The box looks quite regular and inside you can find a CD with drivers, the users manual, one S-video cable and the card. We were quite satisfied about the manual quality because even if it doesn't look amazing from the outside inside you will find valuable information about the physical installation and drivers configuration. For an advanced user such information is worthless, but for the novice this info may be valuable.
The card looked quite interesting from the fist look. The memory is covered with heatsinks and a heatsink plus a fan cover the GeForce2 Pro chip. But we will talk later about Excalibur's cooling features. The card has a S-video TV out and a DVI output to be used with a digital LCD. We didn't try the DVI output in this review, but the S-video output was tested.

The Conexant chip used by Pine's card TV out provided a decent quality, but it was not the best ever seen at PC Hardware. Some users might miss the video composite output which is not in the Excalibur feature set. Overall the card seemed to have at least from a first perspective a good design. The powerful memory cooling using heatsinks is not a very common characteristic of GeForce2 that's why we expected to high memory performance.
Take a look below to a picture of the card.

As you can see the video out interface is achieved using a daughter board. I do not know if there are versions of Excalibur on the market which do not have the video output daughter board. It's best to check before you buy.