Acer H5360

Acer H5360 3D Video Projector

3D Vision is one ace up Nvidia’s GPU sleeve that AMD doesn’t have an answer for. And if you enjoy 3D Vision on the small screen, you’ll really dig it writ large with Acer’s H5360 DLP video projector—provided you can accept the shortcomings inherent to the projector, Nvidia’s GPUs, and 3D Vision in general. When it comes to putting an Nvidia GPU in your home-theater PC, the biggest drawback is that none of the green team’s cards provide the protected audio path needed to route encrypted HD audio to the card’s HDMI output. So if you want to hear the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks on Blu-ray movies—and you do—you’ll need to invest in a specialized soundcard, such as Asus’s Xonar HDAV or Auzentech’s X-Fi Home Theater HD. The projector itself has two weaknesses: Most significantly, its native resolution is 1280x720, versus 1920x1080. That matters most when you’re watching Blu-ray movies, because they look so much better splashed across a wall-size screen at 1080p. On the other hand, the limited resolution becomes something of a perverse benefit when it comes to gaming, for reasons we’ll explain in a moment.