which TV card should I buy? (1 Viewer)

[alexisbatman]

What TV card should I get???

I'm building a media centre PC. I want dual channel freeview TV so i can watch one channel whilst recording another. I'll also want to be able to resume from standby with minimal fuss. Ive heard the hauppauge card below is USB based (despite looking like a PCI card) and has problems going out of standby mode. Is this true?

My question is which card is better for my needs?

TVCARDS in question...

-Pinnacle Dual DVB-T Pro PCI

-Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T-500


SYSTEM card has to run on.

MOBO - MSI K9N6SGM-V, NVIDIA MCP61, Socket AM2, PCI-E x16, DDR2 533/667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, uATX
CPU - AMD Athlon XP x2 3800+
1 gb RAM

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

if you have a PCI-e spare the Terratec Cinergy 2400i is the best bet.

Pinnacle is second choice, as long as you have good reception (not its strong point)

T500 (mine) great reception, shame its 2 usb based tuners on a pci card, which can cause standby resume failure, showing by MP as no audio\video error when trying to record.

Cheers

 

[alexisbatman]

thanks man,

have looked into Terratec Cinergy 2400i card but it looks a bit more demanding than my system would handle. It wants a 2ghz CPU and the AMD chip im using is only 1.7 so probably no good. Any others out there?

 

[Lomax01]

The system specs state a requirement of a 2ghz Intel chip; this is not the same as a 2ghz AMD chip. I may be wrong and readily corrected but I think you will find your 1.7 AMD chip quite able to handle it.

 

[petsa]

I have the Terratec 2400i and I'm not quite sure why you would need a fast CPU. When I watch TV the CPU usage (C2D 2,4GHz) rarely go beyond 15%, except for HDTV (h264) then it would be around 50%.

Now I have installed a Nvidia 8600GT which takes care of the decoding in HW and the CPU util is about 1-5% for regular TV and 5-10% for HDTV. Quite cool actually...

/Peter

PS. I should mention that the card has worked really well. Can only second the comment above about standby issues. I tried the T500 but had some severe issues with S3 standby...

 

[alexisbatman]

thanks for your comments. I think I'll go with the Terratec 2400i hardware

many thanks

Alex H

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Cannot understand why the 2Ghz spec as no decoding is done by the processor, even timeshifting is down to the hard drive.

Anyway, good luck with your purchase, need anymore help just ask.