Not content with dominating the semi-professional end of video editing, Matrox has reworked its 'Power of X' technology for a more humble audience. Essentially the same card as the X100, but without the C-Cube chip, the X10 is almost half the price of its big brother, yet it packs in a plethora of features never before seen at this price level.

The absence of the C-Cube means the X10 performs most of its editing duties in software. The G550 graphics chip remains for 3D effects, and there's an IEEE 1394 controller, but everything else uses the host CPU. This means the X10 requires a meaty PC. An Athlon or Pentium 4 of 2GHz or equivalent with 512MB of RAM is required. Unfortunately, none of VIA's KT chipsets are supported, which puts the majority of existing Athlon systems out of the picture.

For video capture, there's a choice between Matrox's excellent DV-only Media Tools and Premiere's built-in utility. Media Tools will automatically log your clips using time-code scene detection, but only Premiere can acquire analog video. When editing, two layers of video and two graphics layers can be combined in realtime, with some combinations of multiple effects possible.Although many of the 3D effects from previous RT products aren't included with the X10, there is still a wide selection on offer. There's also an excellent Colour Correction filter, which can fix white balance problems automatically and create sepia, black and white or colourisation effects. Unfortunately, the real-time keying introduced with the X100 isn't available in the X10.

Without the C-Cube chip, there's no realtime DV output to IEEE 1394 and no realtime MPEG-2 IBP output. Nor is the accelerated Matrox Media Export supported. However, as the X10 comes with Premiere 6.5, its built-in tools for MPEG-1, -2 and streaming video can be used instead. Potential buyers need to be careful with the chipset restrictions, but otherwise the RT.X10 brings incredible editing power to a lower price point than we've seen before.