TV Tuner - A Hardware That Transforms PC

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 04/14/2005 | 11:19 PM ]

Computers may be powerful and may be not, but virtually any TV tuner automatically transforms them into multimedia machines with broad set of capabilities. The Tech Report has posted a comparison of three TV tuners. All of the competitors feature hardware MPEG2 encoding and are fully compatible with Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 operating system. ATI TV Wonder Elite, eVGA NVTV and Hauppauge PVR-150MCE l.p. were compared in terms of CPU utilization, image quality, bundle and price.

“Overall, it’s hard to come up with a verdict. The PVR-150MCE l.p. is easy to discount due to its comparatively poor image quality. Although the TV Wonder Elite has great image quality, works flawlessly, and comes with a swanky remote, it costs twice as much as the competition. The eVGA NVTV, which also has low CPU utilization and great image quality, runs only $62 online and comes bundled with the NVDVD decoder, making it perfect for Media Center Edition and thus our Editor’s Choice. Just keep in mind that if you have an Athlon 64 system with a VIA chipset, you might want to avoid the NVTV until NVIDIA resolves its issues with that platform,” concludes The Tech Report.

• The Tech Report: Hardware MPEG2 TV Tuner Comparison.